De-paved a parking lot, put up a mini-paradise
Public art project in Rey Sargent park on Lonsdale salmon in a stream
Clear-flowing creeks are a hallmark of our beautiful mountainside home. But we haven’t exactly treated creeks well. We’ve dammed them, re-directed them and shoved them underground— covering them with pavement or concrete and piping them through plastic and corrugated metal. Yup, replacing an old-growth forest over the last 200 years with roads, houses and other human necessities has done a number on our creeks. Not to mention the critters that live(d) in them.
You probably know a handful of our creeks, but look at this map: There are TONS of them.
Map by Steve Tornes
What’s remarkable about this map is that if you look at the area outlined in grey (this is the City of North Vancouver boundary), there are very few creeks. It’s not so much that they never existed, instead, they have been redirected beneath our roads and buildings. My own house sits where there once was a lake. As cities expand, the delicate balance of natural water systems is disrupted, leading to two significant problems.
First, the water collected in our storm drains has little chance of getting clean before dumping into our creeks. Before the ‘big pave’, rainwater would fall on moss-covered, loamy soil and sink deep into the ground, eventually joining up with a creek or river after filtering through layers of leaves, soil, and rock. Now, water from heavy rain events runs directly into stormwater drains and then into our creeks. And it’s dirty water. People who study these things say that lots of toxins enter our creeks: microplastics, tire chemicals, metals, salts, antifreeze, and more. These chemicals don’t make for a healthy critter environment, meaning fish, frogs, crayfish, dragonflies, and more can’t thrive.
Second, we can’t contain the runoff anymore. Even after super expensive stormwater management projects like the one in Deep Cove, our culverts still overflow, flooding homes and businesses. It’s a battle we seem to be losing with traditional engineering tactics.
There are natural solutions
Rain gardens offer a natural way to mitigate both toxic loads and runoff problems. You’ve probably seen one. They look like mini-rivers with rocks in the bottom, ‘banks’ covered with native trees, shrubs and plants and an outlet that goes into a storm drain. The idea is that run-off water enters the garden at the top. The garden slows the water so that it can more easily enter the ground instead of skating across the pavement. Rain gardens also clean toxins before entering our traditional storm drain systems.
A rain garden on Lonsdale @ 21st Street
Storm sewers vs. Wagg Creek
It’s not just municipalities working to create rain gardens. North Shore Streamkeepers Vice President Carolynne Robertson has long championed the renewed health of a Mosquito Creek tributary called Wagg Creek. Wagg Creek has degraded from being buried in pipes as part of our stormwater management system -- in particular at Highway #1. With that degradation, fish populations have plummeted. In 1970, Beale Maynard noted “that a radical decline in fish populations in Mosquito and Wagg Creeks occurred in 1944, shortly after the development of the storm sewer network.”
Wagg Creek begins above the highway and runs diagonally south-westward, disappearing underground as it crosses Lonsdale to reemerge at a pipe outfall between 22nd and 23rd below Chesterfield. Here’s the map:
Wagg Creek above and below the highway
And here’s what an outfall looks like:
This outfall drains a .4 sq km catchment encompassing St. Georges to Ridgeway, from above Upper Levels to E 20th St.
Over the years, citizens have tried to improve conditions surrounding and in the creek to promote aquatic life. Volunteer weed pulls, and new plantings have helped, but the creek remains a far cry from what it used to be when it supported a healthy coho salmon and cutthroat trout population as far up as Wagg Creek Park. Area residents remember fishing for cutthroat as kids. However, since a new culvert was built at Jones Ave and 18th, the salmon and trout no longer live above it, though there are sticklebacks. The culvert is 2 metres high, and the water moves very quickly, so the trout and salmon can’t make it past this barrier.
Monitoring stations along Wagg Creek like this in the photo are where volunteers collect stormwater samples and measurements, including temperature, alkalinity, depth and conductivity and more. Conductivity is a measure of water's ability to pass an electrical flow and indicates dissolved chemicals in the water.
The stake indicates this location is a monitoring station
According to Robertson, Wagg Creek's conductivity fluctuates rapidly during rainfall in response to runoff from the streets into storm drains. These sudden changes make it tough for fish to survive.
Citizens step in to help
The North Shore Alliance Church’s environmental club learned from North Shore Streamkeepers that rain gardens remove up to 80% of pollutants from road runoff. Because their church parking lot drains to Wagg Creek two blocks away, club members and the Streamkeepers teamed up to create a rain garden out of concern for the impact of car-generated pollutants.
Location of the Rain Garden in relation to Wagg Creek
Formerly, on the location was a row of concrete block blocks, an ugly outlook for homes on the lane next to the parking lot.
Concrete blocks in the parking lot where the rain garden was built
Volunteers completed the rain garden in fall 2024 after nearly two years of planning and $10,500 worth of funding from the City of North Vancouver, Pacific Salmon Foundation, and Nature Trust of BC. The North Shore Rain Garden Project (SFU) provided the design.
The garden has visually transformed the area. Over 150 plants were selected for seasonal colour and will support birds and pollinators come spring. Most importantly, the garden reduces the volume of toxic stormwater headed for city pipes and Wagg Creek by soaking it up and filtering it through the ground.
The rain garden in action
Details from the new rain garden
The transformation of a portion of an urban parking lot into a living rain garden serves as an inspiring example of community-driven environmental stewardship. Robertson says it is a great start, acknowledging that it’s a small-scale solution and that we need many, many more rain gardens and a plan to integrate them with our traditional municipal stormwater management systems. There are examples from the Metro area where municipalities have done just that. Vancouver’s Raincity Strategy promotes nature-based solutions to rainwater management including the use of rain gardens to capture and clean rainwater to reduce flooding and prevent harmful substances from entering creeks.
When we re-develop or when streets come up for reconfiguration or renewal, rain gardens should automatically be incorporated where they will positively impact creek health and stormwater management.
________
If this article resonates with you and your values, please sign-up for our mailing list. We're building a group of like-minded people who want to see the vision we've outlined on these pages. Our mailing list is not frequent (generally one per month) and always respectful. You can leave at any time.
