Fens and bogs and swamps, oh my

It’s not a word you run into often at St. John’s city council: fen.

But it was front and centre on Monday, along with a host of other descriptive watery words: bogs, swamps, marshes and “areas of open water.” (A fen, by the way, is a peat-generating, fully water-saturated patch of ground, much like a bog — the difference is that bogs get their water from atmospheric sources, while fens get their moisture from sources of groundwater. Today’s biology lesson.)

So why did fens come up?

At long last, the city has completed a study of wetlands within the city’s boundaries and identified more than 10,000 wetlands.

The work was done by remote sensing, and council voted unanimously to protect any wetlands within the city’s watershed areas, along with wetlands in the Goulds environmentally valuable area, on floodplains, and in remote areas of the city. More important, though, is the next step. The city’s going to do further review on 17 areas where city staff expect there to be plans for additional development in the next 10 to 20 years. You may recognize a few of the areas they’re talking about: Autumn Drive, Barrows Road, Bishops Line, Castlebridge Drive, Empire Avenue West, Galway, Harbourview Avenue, Kilbride South, Lundrigan’s Marsh, Outer Cove Brook, Pearltown Road, Southlands, the Synod Wetlands, Viscount Street, Kenmount Road, Yellow Marsh and Kilbride East.

The city expects to have a field assessment completed on those areas by next year.

And you can be sure that the assessment will have the full attention of real estate developers.

That’s because wetlands don’t fit the grid patterns that make the most effective and profitable use of land that developers may have plans for. In fact, wetlands are often, well, awkward-shaped, illplaced and inconvenient for suburban regularity.

In the past, the solutions were simple: drain the swamp, fill the marsh, run brooks and streams underground through drainage piping when they are a problem for simple planning grids. Corral all that messy nature into confines that suit development needs, building things like artificial surge ponds and underground storm water tanks to try to control flooding.

Problem is, that doesn’t always work. And it certainly doesn’t work as, almost every year, provincial research indicates we’ll be facing storms with not only more intense rainfall, but increasing rainfall amounts that have already resulted in the need to redraw floodplain maps.

Wetlands are a crucial part of flood control; they soften the peaks of intense rainfall by absorbing it and releasing it more slowly than lawns, streets, sidewalks and parking lots, meaning storm water systems aren’t overwhelmed. And that’s only one small part of their value in terms of everything from cleaning water of contaminants and providing crucial wildlife habitat.

Step one is finding them all. Step two is keeping them safe.