This weekend the neighborhood participates in an annual ritual to clean out the storm drains alongside the road. The storm drains catch whatever debris floats along, and over a year it can add up. The way our neighborhood is laid out is that there is a storm drain located in front of each house. So every year they circle around a memo, give us bags to collect the debris, and on a certain day we take the wet dripping bags full of debris out to the main garbage collection area outside our neighborhood.
The first year we moved here we didn’t really notice the memo, and the day after our neighbor said that he went ahead and cleaned out our drain because it was almost clean anyway. Thanks, dude. I gave him a couple of cold imported beers from our fridge and told him we’d get on it for next year.
The second year I got my act together, went outside, opened up the drain, and there was about one half of a handful worth of dirt. I picked out a couple of rocks, but it wasn’t really worth wasting a bag on – I just pitched the dirt into our front yard and called it a day.
The third year was much the same, with the same results. The houses around us have a big bag full of dirt each year – they are out there scooping and scraping to fill their bags. So last year I played around with the water hose and found something interesting.
I live on the end of a cul de sac, in the southwest corner. Already that cuts down on the potential for dirt because no cars drive by our storm drain. Using the water hose I discovered that whoever designed the road had it graded so that rainwater from the main road either flows down away from our house to the Yagi’s storm drain next to us, or in a diagonal path to the Nishizumi’s drain on the other side. The only water that gets into our storm drain is what falls directly on it, and in a year that doesn’t bring in much dirt.
So lucky us, and I think I’ll sleep in next year (or maybe the next two or three years). It’ll be nice to hear the scraping away of the neighbors while I’m in bed relaxing next time.
