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Rain barrel rescue

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Staff

By Grady McCallie

In the forty-first chapter of Genesis, it is written that, as Joseph languished in jail, Pharaoh dreamt. In his vision, seven fat cows were devoured by seven gaunt cows that emerged from the Nile. Ushered into Pharaoh’s presence, Joseph interpreted the dream: seven years of plenty would give way to seven years of famine. Scripture isn’t clear whether the famine was caused by a drought, but, forewarned and forearmed, Pharaoh appointed Joseph to build silos to store up grain from the fat years, guarding the people of Egypt against the lean years.  

I haven’t had a bad dream, unless you count our water bill for May. It was $70 for a household of two people — and seven tomato plants, two peppers, one fringe tree and an assortment of carrots, beets, beans, greens and flowers. It has been, according to North Carolina’s official Drought Monitoring Council, abnormally dry, but this was more than we’d bargained for in planting our garden.

Yet water spilt on the ground cannot be gathered up again. So, on Saturday, I visited a local nursery and bought a 60-gallon rain barrel. It is a black, plastic recycled pickle barrel with a faucet at the bottom and a screen at the top to keep out mosquitoes. I also stopped at a hardware store and picked up two elbows of drainpipe, a pair of budget tin-snips and two pavers.

At home, the barrel went on top of the pavers, so a watering can could fit under the faucet. I undid a bracket on a corner downspout and applied the tin-snips to the screw hole, trimming off the downspout about four feet off the ground. The pipe elbows fit together, one end plugged into the downspout, the other positioned over the barrel. Finished, I stood beside the empty barrel and looked into a hot, sunny sky, wondering if the barrel would see any action before September.

At half past one Sunday morning, we were roused by the loud drumming of rain on the roof. Half awake, I raced around the house, peering out the windows at the unexpected downpour. The exact amount of rain we received is unclear — our gauge is broken. But, lo and behold, when we stepped outside Sunday morning, the barrel was full to overflowing. We were amazed. Our house and roof are not large — but just half of the roof filled a 60-gallon barrel overnight. It dawned on us that until now, every time it rained like this, this much water ran down our drive and down the street into a creek. It still does, off the other side of the house.

It’s no secret that runoff erodes creeks. I’ve known runoff from a shopping center to turn a healthy, shallow creek into a six-foot deep gulley, scoured lifeless. Still, it was surprising to see how much water a single, modest roof can shed and how easy it was to capture much of that runoff for use in the yard. Like Joseph’s silo, the rain barrel will help moderate both feast and famine, slowing runoff when it storms and easing the demand we place on city water during a dry spell.

With polluted runoff being the leading cause of water-quality problems across the state, it’s nice to know it’s possible to wash one’s hands, or at least one’s plants, in innocence. For doesn’t the prophet advise, “Drink water from your own cistern; flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets?” No, indeed – and I think I’ll acquire a second rain barrel soon.

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