Rehydrating community and controlling flooding with in-street and street-side water harvesting

Brad Lancaster hosts this video about how in-street and street-side water-harvesting basins, or rain gardens, rehydrate our communities, grow shading/cooling vegetation, and control flooding. Thus the street runoff irrigates the street-side and in-street vegetation for free! Footage from July 2021.

The multi-use native vegetation within these rain gardens is well established and only irrigated by the passively-harvested rainfall and street runoff. This helps recharge our groundwater aquifer three ways:

1. Since no municipal or well water is used to irrigate the plantings, no water is extracted/pumped in to water the plants (the “need” to pump groundwater has been eliminated).

2. More water infiltrates the soil than the plants consume and evapotranspire, so surplus can continue to migrate downward and recharge the aquifer.

3. The vegetation within these rain gardens shades and cools the surrounding area, thereby reducing the evaporative and transpireative loss of water from nearby landscapes.

For more on these neighborhood native food forestry efforts see:
www.DunbarSpringNeighborhoodForesters.org