It often happens before a big forecast storm, that people get upset about a canal that’s clogged with vegetation. “It needs to be cleaned out! The water will have no place to go!” Is what people tend to say.
I want our local governments to get more aware of the fact that water flow starts far uphill of where the canals are, and our General Shermanesque “moonscape landscaping” policy does affect that.
We need to be catching water far higher up on the landscape. Every square centimeter of tree canopy & other vegetation that we remove unnecessarily, causes that much more water to end up down at the canals and other low points, where there will almost inevitably be a bottleneck.
One of the first things we learned in Permaculture class: Start collecting/retaining water as high uphill as we can, because once we are stuck trying to address it at the lower level it becomes a civil engineering project.
Also: I didn’t know this until fairly recently, but a key component of stormwater absorption is healthy soil. Healthy soil absorbs stormwater many times better than soil that has been sickened by poisons, ripping out topsoil, etc.
I learned that there are more microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil than the number of humans on earth. It’s a whole tiny kingdom in there.