I love the rain. It cleanses the city. Everything looks and smells clean and fresh. My biggest problem, though, with the rain is that so much of it goes to waste. With Israel’s future rain forcasts in question waiting for rain can be nerve-wracking. And when it finally comes, so much of it goes to waste. It’s sad.
If there were a way to collect all of that rain and make sure that it goes where it needs to go… Now we’re talking! If we could collect all of the water that falls in the streets and rooftops of a city during a rainy season, could we live off of that for the coming year?
The TALI Geulim Elementary School in the Geulim (Baka) neighborhood of Jerusalem is doing it’s best to see if that can happen. This past Friday morning about 20 parents of children in the school gathered with giant plastic cisterns, meters of rubber tubing, a ladder and some tools to build a rain-collecting system on the school’s roof to replace the water supply used in the toilets and gardening.
This is part of two projects that the school is running: the first, religious, and the second, environmental. Fifth grader Ori Tenne explained that they had learned about the water situation in Israel already. “There isn’t a lot of water in Israel and so we need to conserve and not waste it and we are saving water here. A man came and explained how there wasn’t enough water getting to Lake Kinneret,”
I have always believed that the education system has a huge impact on our society. It’s wonderful to see such leaders in this area, environment, where we need change the most. From this project in Geulim to the curriculum changes in Bet Shemesh, we need to take a page out of their books and implement these programs at home and at work!
Source: JPost
Average annual rainfall in Israel ranges from a low of 32mm in Eilat, through 500-550 in the center and coast (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa) to 600-650 in the north (Nahariya, Galilee), up to reported top levels of 1,100 mm. London has about 600 mm, and Cornwall over 1,100 mm. So we get the same amount of rain as England on an annual basis, but it’s concentrated into 6 months of the year.
In order to save rainwater for irrigation in Israel, the challenge is to plan ahead and build enough storage for the 5-6 months of dry season, because we aren’t like “upstate NY where it rains quite often.”
Colin is correct that because of our often extreme rain events (1 month’s worth of rain in 2 days), much of it flows over land and through sewers to the sea and does not recharge the aquifers
I live in Upstate NY where it rains quite often.
To cover the dry spells (if that’s what you could call them) I catch rain water in converted 50 gallon foodgrade barrels. This past summer was very wet for our region and I “wasted” more rain water.
For the weeks that we did not have any rain it was nice to use the rain water from the barrels.
Robert
How much rain do you get in Israel every year? Where I live in Denver, we hardly ever have rain storms in the summer anymore. We are lucky to reach our average of two inches. And where I lived last year, it wasn’t unusual for rain storms to produce over two inches themselves. And it was always funny to hear the people complain about how they were in a drought, when nearly all of the rain went to the sewers and into the rivers and into the ocean.
In Colorado, we at least have the luxury of collecting most of our rain in the sewers that all lead back into the pipes eventually. I wish more cities who didn’t receive much rain or received so much they don’t think it to be a problem in the future would make efforts to collect the rain fall and put it to better use.
Again it will probably take a crisis for anyone to ever come to the conclusion that we take rain for granted.
That would be one of the greatest things in the whole world, would be a relatively cheap to implement system of rain gathering for the tops of all buildings and rooftops. So in addition to just praying for rain, and using the rain, we would be able to store it and use for later.
How to Make the Most of the Rain http://tinyurl.com/6y48yf