It may be hard for some of us to believe, but there is actually a positive side to all these storms. Many people are taking full advantage of all this rain by harvesting it for plants.
“Rain is free water. I mean, we don’t pay for it. There’s not a bill and so once you install the system, you can start collecting it,” says Vikram Baliga, with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.
There are two underground water harvesting systems at the Lubbock County Courthouse, which were installed about a year and a half ago. Each tank holds 2,000 gallons of rainwater, and from above the ground, you would never know. They just look like basic landscape waterfalls.
“Which means in the three and a half inches of rain we got yesterday, that translates to about 12,000 gallons of water,” Baliga says.
They are designed to run when the tanks are full of rainwater, so during the rainy seasons the fountains will be running and they will irrigate the landscape around it. If it dries up for a while and the tanks run out of water, then the fountains turn off until there is rain again.
“Lubbock County wants to lead by example and have a drought tolerant landscape by rainwater harvesting. We do a lot of the things that we recommend to the public,” Baliga says. “I would love for everyone in Lubbock to have a rain barrel, whether that’s a 50 gallon trash can or a 1,000 gallon system. Every little bit we do helps. It also helps manage our storm water runoff and helps just build a better urban landscape overall.”
Baliga says it’s better quality water, because it is clean and there are no minerals in it. This is something that water harvester, Cecilia George, loves about this conservation method. She has been harvesting water for at least 10 years.
“It’s free and coming out of the sky…millions and millions of gallons of water. I want to collect anything I can,” she says.
George installed a 1,000 gallon rain barrel in her backyard and also uses five 30 gallon garbage cans.
“With this last rain we had, it is full to the top and overflowing, so I will have a lot of really good rainwater for my flower beds now. It’s not going on my water bill, and it’s not coming out of the aquifer. I feel good about that,” she says.
George recommends starting small. She says you can buy already-made rain barrels, go online and make your own, or even get garbage cans like she has to collect the rain off her roof.
“People can collect much more rain than they think. If you have 1,000 square feet of roof, and it’s guttered, you will collect 600 gallons of water off of one inch of rainfall,” she says. “We don’t have any water to waste.”
