Nature at Your Doorstep 
Now Flowing

– By Russ Johnson –

While Rye residents probably think that April was Rivers Month, the official American Rivers Month is June. Watershed groups across the nation are hosting flotillas, canoe sojourns, clean-up efforts, creek courses and other river awareness events throughout the month. Many of our educational study tours at the Nature Center feature a stop at the segment of Blind Brook that runs through the preserve.

In one of our classes, I had a group of third graders observe the brook and asked if they could tell which way the water was running. For a moment, standing beside a sluggish pool, they were mystified, but then they noticed a small waterfall and could easily tell which direction was downstream. Everyone in the class agreed that the river was flowing “that way.” Then one small voice piped up, “But where is it going?”

I answered that the Blind Brook goes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean by flowing into Milton Harbor and out of Long Island Sound.  Even though the mouth of the brook is only a mile away, the third graders had a hard time visualizing the river/ocean connection. Then one of the children asked a harder question. “So where does it come from?”

The answer: It comes from your doorstep! We all have a street address and a watershed address. Just as you can get to grandma's house by starting down your driveway, onto a residential street, turning left of a county route, right on a state highway and merging onto the Interstate, you can follow a raindrop falling on your roof to the ocean starting with a drainage swale, merging into a runnel, turning left down a tributary stream, forking right into a brook and merging into the big river.

When a small stream first gathers rainwater from the land it may only run intermittently.  Where ground water feeds the flow, or seepage from a wetland provides water, the stream will flow year-round and is called a first order stream. Two of these young streams come together to form a second order stream; two second order streams form a third order stream; and so on. A larger river, such as the Hudson, may be considered a 6th or 8th order stream. The Mississippi is a 10 and the Amazon a 12.

If you follow a river from the sea back to the source, always picking the larger of the two tributaries when it branches, you eventually reach the first order stream farthest from the mouth. This is known as the headwaters of the river. The great Hudson River, which takes a half-hour to walk across on the Tappan Zee Bridge, can be stepped across in one stride at its headwaters at tiny Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks.

In your backyard, the Blind Brook, (or Beaver Swamp Creek if you live at the south end of Rye) rises in the rain gutter at the edge of your roof. There is an intermittent stream in your downspout. It flows down your driveway into the street, where your water quickly joins that of other homeowners and adds to the volume of the brook. Multiplied by 20,000 households, it becomes a powerful flow that can scour the riverbanks, undermine bridges and carry away trash dumpsters.

Since you personally control one of the headwaters of the creek, you can take some simple steps to mitigate flooding before the next heavy rain. You can capture some of this flow, and lessen the multiplier effect, with a rain barrel attached to your down spout. If your downspout leads out onto pavement, redirect or extend it to empty onto your lawn, where some runoff will be absorbed.

Since your lawn is compacted by foot traffic, about 40% of the rain falling there will run off. You can decrease runoff just by increasing the width of your existing flowerbeds and borders, which have a runoff coefficient of only 1%. Best of all, consider creating a rain garden. This is a low swale that will collect the effluent from your downspout and hold it for a day or two after a rainstorm. Moisture-loving plants will thrive there and provide you with a whole new palette of landscaping possibilities.

Of course, you cannot curb the entire flood alone. Remember, we are talking about a multiplier effect here. There are many, many tributaries to each stream and many, many people must contribute to the solution. So take a look at your neighbors' downspouts and give them a copy of this article.

More interestingly, the USEPA categorizes the Lower Blind Brook as “impaired,” meaning not swimable, drinkable or fishable, due to silt and sedimentation. But we can discuss that in October, which is “American Clean Water Month.”