A very lucid video illustrating what happens if we all just grab some shovels and get dirty!  (if we do it right, that is…)

**Update** It appears someone doesn’t want us watching that nice educational video, so here is a graphic that shows about the same thing, illustrating the importance of ditches, swales, rain gardens and generally slowing down the flow of rainwater as it runs off down a hill.

gw_groundwater_flow

 

Above is exactly what rain gardens are shooting for, and below is why we should encourage runoff into green spaces instead of funneling all kinds of crap (literally, in this case) into your local lake every time it rains…

Portland's new exhibit: Poop polluting the river

Portland’s solution for poop in the river.

…which deserves an exhibit all it’s own at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry.  It seems about 780 other cities in the U.S. with combined storm sewers have this problem, too, whenever it rains pretty hard.

This one will be complete some time in 2011, at 60 million or 600 million or some ridiculous amount that we are all paying for.

A few RainBench kits, a WaterShed and Earthship’s $3100 rainwater filtration system or even this filtration setup aren’t sounding too bad now…

…and maybe taking a page (or 2) out of Michael’s book on blackwater systems (contained septic treatment) could help in this case, too.