I wish to thank Destination Infinity for this post. I find his blog post quite interesting and practical.
Every year Mumbai rains make news and for all the wrong reasons. When I keep on watching images of Mumbai flooded with rain I wonder why such an abundance and why an equal amount of waste? Of course, current mai baap of Mumbai, Mr. Raj Thackray doesn’t have time for such stupid things for Marathis and Maharashtra. I was reading about rain water harvesting at Wikipedia.
Rainwater harvesting in urban areas can have manifold reasons. To provide supplemental water for the city’s requirement,it increase soil moisture levels for urban greenery, to increase the ground water table through artificial recharge, to mitigate urban flooding and to improve the quality of groundwater are some of the reasons why rainwater harvesting can be adopted in cities. In urban areas of the developed world, at a household level, harvested rainwater can be used for flushing toilets and washing laundry. Indeed in hard water areas it is superior to mains water for this. It can also be used for showering or bathing. It may require treatment prior to use for drinking.
In New Zealand, many houses away from the larger towns and cities routinely rely on rainwater collected from roofs as the only source of water for all household activities. This is almost inevitably the case for many holiday homes.
Here is what Destination Infinity thinks:
Sometimes, we do not need to develop wisdom by re-inventing the wheel. For centuries, rain water harvesting has been a dominant activity in our country. Be it for irrigation systems, be it in temples, be it in the backyard of ones own house. This is something that we have always been doing. But, after the concrete jungles have taken over the cities, Rainwater Harvesting has not been in the fore front of demands of any purchaser or builder of home/ apartment in urban landscapes. Do we wake up only after a large scale disaster hits us, like Los Angeles – whose case is explained in the video below?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHi4IU7JQ5Q&feature=related
Rain water harvesting in an urban landscape could be as simple as collecting the water flowing from the terraces out into the road (and causing local street flooding) into an underground tank/ sump or a cachement area which could later used for washing clothes, Cars, cooking, flushing toilets etc. (OR) Letting the rainwater flow into the ground from the terrace through multiple layers of natural filtering like broken bricks etc. which would contribute to the rise of the water tables in the area.
The following two websites have all the resources, case studies, links, community projects and all the necessary information on rainwater harvesting – particularly in India.
http://akash-ganga-rwh.com/RWH/WaterHarvesting.html
The following video is actually an advertisement for the rain water harvesting systems but has a lot of information on practical implementation of rain water harvesting. As they say, some times the advertisements are more informative and useful than the programs/serials in our television.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsV_JgLzW4w&feature=related
And if you have watched all the videos till now, do watch this one also. A nice way of putting across the message. Just to end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xtMnE9Bo6s
Do let know if you know of any interesting implementations of the rain water harvesting methods in your area.