When Ann Soule asked me to come off the bench and pinch hit writing this edition of “Water Matters,” she didn’t realize she was asking a point guard to bull rush up the middle and pancake the goalie. Along with a promise to deep-six the sports metaphors, what I mean is, I’m no hydrogeologist.
Ann has an amazing grasp of the hydrologic cycle and all things water. I don’t. That’s not to say I can’t write about water, just not knowledgeably.
I moved to Sequim from Northern California (okay, hold the rotten tomatoes, I grew up in Tacoma and went to the U). The rainfall in Sonoma County measures more than double what we get in the Dungeness Valley, and boy is the water cycle there different. Summers are beautiful, but hot and dry.
By September, I’d be thinking that a passing shower wouldn’t be that bad a thing, just to remind me that water really did fall from the sky. Then came the rainy season, and Pacific storms swept across the coastal plain on a 10 day cycle you could set your sundial by.
When my San Francisco commute started topping two hours each way I began to think it was time to move back north. My wife, certainly no dummy — and a Seattle native — balked, unwilling to move back into that damp 10-month gloom. That set me to researching rainfall and sunshine statistics across Washington.
I fed all our criteria into the Univac X5000 and out popped two punch cards, one said Othello and the other said Sequim. Oookaaay … we gave the matter serious thought for several milliseconds and then chose Sequim.
So we moved here and, by golly, it does rain less. I just wish the blue hole and the sun would coincide more often.
In California, we always lived on the edge of drought; Sequim got a taste of that in 2015 and it’s not a pleasant thought that this may one day become the norm. But unpleasant thoughts don’t go away by ignoring them.
When the spring snow melt fails us, we need to look to other sources of fresh water. I have stood on the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, looking left and right (it took me years to accept that coastlines can run east-west instead of north-south), imagining the torrents of stormwater runoff that follow a winter storm, fresh water turning itself into salt water. This runoff is a resource, an incredibly valuable resource.
Before the Dungeness Valley was developed, much, if not most, of this runoff was captured, slowed by thick vegetation and absorbed into the ground. Development has made the valley a place that people can live and prosper, but it means we have to work harder to harness the runoff resource. We have begun to do that but need to seriously accelerate the process.
Capturing stormwater is something we do in the City of Sequim in engineered infiltration trenches, it happens in the County in irrigation ditches, but always, more can be done. A description of the Dungeness off-channel reservoir has appeared in this column and it looks likely that a major hurdle in making that project a reality may have been passed with the legislature appropriating money to purchase land, off River Road, where the eighty acre reservoir will be sited.
We will continue to find new ways to harness stormwater, putting it into the ground where it can feed our streams and the aquifers we all rely on for drinking water.
So there it is, a whole column about water, no doubt well-watered by the agonized tears of those reading it. We can all look forward to Ann’s return in the next “Water Matters.”
Greek Moment
The hydrologic cycle was first described by the ancient Greeks, along with a few that were only middle aged. Plato’s theory of the source of the rivers and streams that watered his native Attica was widely accepted throughout Europe into the seventeenth century.
A pretty good shelf life for an idea that was completely wrong; his theory didn’t take any account of rainfall as contributing to the cycle, rather he thought seawater somehow crept through caves and was mysteriously freshened before it burst forth in a riverbed. Now that was a theory that didn’t hold water!
The Dungeness River is flowing strong. Drop in a stick, time its travel downstream, factor in the river bed cross section, edge friction, and boulder distribution, and you can calculate the river’s flow rate without me needing to tell you.
Geek moment
Snowpack in the Olympic Mountains is at 130 percent of normal — a good sign!
Guest columnist David Garlington is the Public Works Director for the City of Sequim.
