"Water, water everywhere?"
by National Building Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino
Ben Franklin warned us. You won’t miss the water ‘til the well runs dry. That’s a cautionary metaphor, but it’s also literally true. In the developed world we take our water for granted. We pour drinking water on our lawns, the largest irrigated crop in America. We spray drinking water to clean sidewalks and wash cars. And that’s just the water we can see.
Let’s face it: we have a dysfunctional relationship with our water. We expect it to be there for us, but we only pay attention when we have to. Billions of people in the developing world have no reliable source of clean water. East Coasters tend to think that water is a problem only when the river rises or the roof leaks. Scarcity affects people somewhere else. States in the Southwest get by on fewer than ten inches of rain each year, yet one of the biggest water battles is being fought in the Southeast. Georgia, Alabama and Florida—each of them the beneficiaries of over four feet of annual rain—have been fighting over the Chattahoochee, the Coosa, and the Tallapoosa Rivers for the last twenty years. Where is all the water going?
Gwinnett County, a booming suburb a thirty minute commute north of Atlanta, decided to try to answer that question in 2006. The county was in the middle of a decade-long growth spurt and concerned about the unintended consequences of being one of the top ten fastest-growing counties in the U.S. County officials sent aircraft outfitted with cameras and geographic information software, GIS, to monitor the growth of impervious surfaces as forests and farmland were being paved over for roads, driveways and parking lots. The county wanted to quantify something that we all can see whenever it rains, that these surfaces convert rain into runoff instead of nourishing vegetation and recharging the ground water. And low-density development produces a lot of impervious surfaces.
The earth is perfectly capable and willing to soak up and cleanse our water, but only if we give it a chance. Georgia’s fifty inches of annual rain pours off roofs, sheets off paving, and sloshes into storm drains, carrying pollutants into waterways and overwhelming the infrastructure. Instead of capturing this water, we spend billions of dollars on infrastructure to send that water directly out to sea—in Georgia’s case sending this water to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. With its annual aerial surveys, Gwinnett County has begun to map its entire water infrastructure to keep track of the condition of pipes and culverts, in addition to pavement. The county used this data to assess a new fee on development to begin to establish a new value for water.
Changing our urban design and development habits is crucial to rethinking our relationship with water. Compact development helps, but all development can be an obstacle to water conservation. Think of it as putting plastic wrap over a sponge. It keeps the sponge from doing what a sponge does best. Design professionals are giving us a new arsenal of strategies for better water management, from low-flow fixtures to green roofs and rain-catching streetscapes. Although we literally can’t get through a day without water, its scarcity and preciousness remain strangely invisible to us. We can see the results of mining, land clearing, logging, but a dwindling aquifer hides beneath us. More difficult still is to see the compounded impact of wasted water, polluted streams and rivers, degraded habitat, subsidence, erosion, and flooding. Gwinnett County is using information technology to make it visible.
Water and information have a lot in common. They both have the power to nourish and to destroy. Both are healthiest when flowing freely. We need them to survive. They both have persistent tendency to leak. And they have a robust disregard for jurisdictional boundaries. Intelligent regions are figuring out how to share both.
