Beijing Water Authority to sign pact with MMSD
China set to follow city’s example when it comes to managing stormwater
Call it stormwater diplomacy. Representatives of the Beijing Water Authority will be in Milwaukee on Thursday to get a firsthand look at stormwater management efforts here that could be adapted in China’s capital city to solve its major flooding and water scarcity problems.
Their visit comes a week after representatives of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, The Water Council, local industries and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. completed a barnstorming tour of Beijing, Nanjing and Haikou in China.
The Milwaukee delegation spoke at three water conferences in five days attended by hundreds of municipal officials and construction company representatives who are seeking both advice and the tools needed to transform many sprawling urban centers into rain-absorbing “sponge cities,” MMSD Executive Director Kevin Shafer said.
“We’re taking lessons learned here from big storms and floods in 2008, 2009 and 2010 to apply them there,” Shafer said.
Milwaukee residents will be familiar with the so-called green infrastructure tools that Shafer presented: rooftop plantings; rain gardens at the end of downspouts; porous pavement for parking lots; grass-lined swales along streets; cisterns and rain barrels.
Those simple technologies mimic nature in capturing water where it falls, and the district intends to partner with private property owners to collect 740 million gallons of water each time it rains by 2035.
The Chinese central government has set a more aggressive schedule than that.
Over the next few years, Beijing and 29 other mega-cities are to become model “sponge cities” by capturing and storing at least 70% of the rain that falls for use during droughts, rather than letting the resource run off vast expanses of concrete and asphalt and cause flooding.
Milwaukee’s stormwater diplomats will roll out their first achievement Thursday when MMSD and the Beijing Water Authority sign a “sister utilities” information-sharing agreement that will ensure an open line of communication between the two cities.
The day includes a tour of the Jones Island sewage treatment plant where they will go 300 feet below ground to the deep tunnel pumping station. While the tunnel system here stores a combination of stormwater and sewage during heavy downpours, the Beijing officials are more interested in digging tunnels to
“We’re taking lessons learned here from big storms and floods in 2008, 2009 and 2010 to apply them there.” Kevin Shafer, MMSD Executive Director
store rainfall until it is needed for drinking water.
Beijing, China’s second most populous city with more than 21.7 million residents, faces numerous water challenges, including scarcity. Booming population growth and largely unplanned urban sprawl in recent decades are not the only reasons for the lack of water resources that can be used to meet public demand.
Add excessive pumping of groundwater and severe pollution of rivers and streams to the list, according to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives in Bonn, Germany.
Many waterways in Beijing are rated as “black and odorous” by the local water authority due to routine discharges of untreated sewage into the rivers.
To ensure an adequate supply of fresh water for drinking, Beijing has started using recycled water from sewage treatment plants to clean streets and to water municipal gardens, according to published news stories in China Daily.
While the city receives an average of 23 inches of precipitation a year, nearly all of that falls in just four summer months, from June to September. That is their monsoon season.
Those intense storms fall on thousands of square miles of concrete, asphalt and other impervious surfaces. Inadequate drainage systems are quickly overwhelmed and the annual monsoons bring severe floods to Beijing and more than 230 other cities, according to news reports.
Most of the rest of the year, Beijing is in drought conditions.
China asked for Milwaukee’s help in breaking this cycle of rain, runoff and drought, said Dean Amhaus, president and CEO of The Water Council.
How will the delegation gauge the success of its stormwater presentations in China? The level of participation in sponge cities.
Katy Sinnott, vice president for international business development for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., said Wisconsin companies, large and small, have the key technologies they need to solve water problems.
“On this trip, our companies are selling solutions,” she said.
Large industrial players, such as Rexnord and A.O. Smith, expect to expand their markets there, Sinnott said. Rexnord already is developing a water efficiency system for the China market.
“PaveDrain already has potential sales,” Sinnott said. The company, a tenant in The Water Council’s Global Water Center on Freshwater Way, sells a permeable paving system throughout the U.S.