There’s a lot of things going on with water in my life right now.
1) It’s raining so hard out right now I feel like if I stay at work much longer, when I leave our world will look like this:
2) When it rains a lot, the crawl space in my basement kind of looks like this:
3) The water isn’t working in our office building which means no bathrooms. Which means that giant plant in the corner of my office is getting eyed up as a porta-potty by some of my coworkers.
4) The crazy storm clouds led to tornadoes dancing all around my home town. Here’s a picture from a friend’s farm:
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE FOREST?
Not many people consider this, but trees use A LOT of water. We had one of the biggest fires ever in Alberta North of Fort MacMurray this year. That fire has (now being held) burnt over 700,000 ha of land (1.7 million acres). That’s 1% of the province, in only one fire. If we had fires like this every year we’d run out of trees pretty quickly. These fires also mean companies can cut less forest sustainably, so that has an effect on our economy and number of jobs.
So North of Fort Mac there’s 1.7 million acres less trees than there used to be. That amount of trees would use about 6.8 BILLION gallons of water every year which is double the water that Red Deer consumes in a year. So where is all of this water going to go? Well not much will go into the soil. Fires actually have this weird reaction with soil that makes the ground kind of repellent to water like a good rain jacket. It’s called hyrdophobicity. That means when it rains, most of this water is going to take a bunch of burnt wood, dirt and possibly small animals with it and dump it into our rivers and lakes everywhere. This will be hard on water quality, and organisms that call these waters their homes. It could also lead to large scale flooding and damage to houses and homes everywhere.
When forest companies plan their harvest, it’s they law they also model what’s going to happen to watersheds. Too bad mother nature doesn’t have to plan that way because she’s going to do some major damage to our province. It’s crazy how a natural disturbance like a fire can have HUGE effects on areas far outside the fires.
In summary, I’ve sloped the ground around my property away from my house, and planted a bunch of bushes, trees and grass that can use lots of water. Hopefully that keeps the river out of my crawl space. I’m going to build my next house on stilts. I’m also going to build a moat around my stilted house as a fire barrier.
Here’s a Glee remix for you.
01 Singing In the Rain _ Umbrella (f