When our family leaves for summer vacations these days, we pull up the rugs in the basement and make sure no valuables are on the floor. Climate change impacts our weather by intensifying the jet stream patterns that move weather systems across the surface of our planet, deepening the grooves where high and low pressure systems meet to create storms, so that storms persist over a region for longer periods of time.
What this means is heavier rainfall during the heaviest rainfall events. More inches of rain dropped within a single rain event. Brace yourselves for more wet basements; the rate of flooding events is not going to decrease anytime soon.
It is the paved and compacted surfaces of our roads, sidewalks, and rooftops that don’t allow water to be absorbed and instead collects and floods. Natural environments with plants and soil absorb water, allowing it to trickle slowly down to replenish the water table below the surface. The more plants present, the more water is likely to stay in place in the soils where it falls. Paving over surfaces has led to more intense flooding events and dirtier waterways.
Oak Park has written in their Climate Change Action and Resiliency Plan an outline for managing floodwaters that depends upon more of us with yards and all of us who use water to do our part. Many more of us will need to shift from old-fashioned ideas about landscaping and start learning to live with a new aesthetic.
As climate change progresses, what it means to be a good neighbor is shifting. If my yard is all pavement, then my neighbor’s yard will have to absorb a lot more water, which increases their risk of basement flooding. On days when it is raining heavily if I do all my laundry on the same day I am adding volume to the flood waters in our sewer pipes that overflow into my neighbor’s basement.
Our community’s resilience through climate change may depend on how thoughtful we are as neighbors.
Laura Brentner
Oak Park
