Mark Weinhold recalls a moment while standing at the edge of a large ravine carved by massive flooding along the Congo River in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, surveying the creeping erosion that was threatening nearby homes.
“This older man walks out of his house and sees us. And, when you see people who are not Congolese that far out of downtown, you know something is happening,” said the Carbondale resident and longtime U.S. Forest Service employee who works for the agency’s National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center out of Fort Collins.
Indeed, something was about to happen.
It was October 2018, and Weinhold was part of a team of hydrologists and water engineers assembled to go to the central African country and offer advice on ways to control urban flooding and limit erosion during monsoon season.
Their presence signaled hope for the man who was about to lose his home, though Weinhold knew based on his assessment that this particular house was already too close to the precipice and wouldn’t survive another year.
Yet, he also knew there was an opportunity to do something to prevent that situation from playing out in other parts of the city, and across the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo city of Kinshasa. Together, the two capital cities are home to more than 17 million people.
From that visit was born a new nonprofit organization founded by Weinhold, the Terra Firma Rainwater Collective. With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Bank, Terra Firma began mobilizing. They now work with local organizations on the ground to educate and assist residents in building rooftop rainwater collection systems, and to revegetate their surroundings to help prevent flooding and erosion.
Weinhold notes that, based on 15 years of data, one in three rainstorms in the region during the monsoon season produces at least 1 inch of rain, and one in nine storms produces 2 inches of rain.
“This tremendous rainfall intensity is not uncommon there, and when you have an urban landscape that’s covered with roofs and roads, it just has nowhere to go,” he said. “That is going to be pushed in a bad direction by climate change, because what’s being experienced is even higher intensity rainfall and then drier dry seasons.”
Rather than a macro solution that an under-resourced and often corrupt government wasn’t going to be able to fund, Weinhold and his team began focusing on a micro solution.
“The problem of urban flooding is imminently solvable,” he said. “We know what causes it; we know how to treat it. But you’re not going to do it with a billion-dollar infrastructure system like New York City would have, for example, to take all that storm water to a safe place.
“What you can do is treat it at the household scale, and manage that water so it doesn’t leave the parcel.”
It’s an approach that incrementally helps with flood control, and it’s a way for families to collect and store water on-site for non-potable domestic use. As it is, they must make regular trips to the nearest public water well with large containers and haul it back to their homes.
It’s a routine Lise-Olga Makonga of Kinshasa is all too familiar with. The nature-based solution put forward by Terra Firma was something the environmental organization she works with could embrace.
Makonga is the local project coordinator for Eco Ecole and CEEDD, or the Centre d’Etudes Environnementales pour le Développement Durable in French, the national language of Congo (Center for Environmental Studies for Sustainable Development in English).
She has been staying in Carbondale since late summer after coming to the United States to study English. She was recently accepted into a graduate program in South Dakota, and will be in the U.S. through the spring before heading back home.
Makonga’s job there is to meet with and select families who are affected by the erosion and suggest the rainwater collection technique as a way to improve their lives.
“We explain that this water can be used for all their jobs at home, and small agriculture activity. Some people can even sell the water,” she said.
Often, it’s the women and children who fetch the water from sometimes far-removed public water wells. That can take hours, and for the children can mean time away from school.
Makonga’s father once had a water source on his compound, but the infrastructure was washed away in the flooding. That can also happen with the many neighborhood water wells that exist throughout the city.
“When we offer this solution, most of the time they agree and they appreciate our method, because it’s an innovation,” Makonga said.
Part of that innovation was the creation of a thermoplastic clipping mechanism that’s used to attach gutters to the wavy, corrugated metal roofs that are common there.
Terra Firma paid for an injection mold and got the patent, and the clips can now be manufactured for about 85-90 cents each.
“When you drive around Kinshasa you’ll see people selling sections of gutter, but there’s no real way to attach them,” Weinhold said.
The clips have a mechanism that adjusts and rotates to fit on any roof of that type.
They’re used on the official Terra Firma/CEEDD projects, now totaling about 120, with storage capacity ranging from about 5,000 to 10,000 liters.
The clips are also becoming a hot commodity, making it into the marketplace and naturally multiplying the use of gutter-collection systems.
“As soon as someone has a gutter and all that water is coming to one point, they put a bucket under it, and then a bigger bucket, and the idea just grows,” Weinhold said.
”So, 120 doesn’t sound like a big number in a city of 17 million people, but it’s a big number when you think about what we have learned over the last couple of years and how we’ve created processes to do it efficiently.”
The CEEDD also works with local residents to help them revegetate and stabilize the sandy soil that’s prone to erosion.
In addition to helping people access electricity and water, there’s an educational aspect to their work, especially among the younger generations, Makonga said.
Certain superstitions still exist, she said.
A common practice in urban development has been to clear-cut all of the trees and remove the grass and flowers, because they can attract snakes and other animals that are viewed as signs of evil, Makonga said.
“We have to teach people that the grass is important to help with erosion, and that when you see a snake that it’s normal and healthy,” she said.
Erica Borum, another Forest Service water engineer from Carbondale who works with Weinhold, is on the Terra Firma board of directors.
She helped design the prototype water tank in Weinhold’s driveway during the pandemic years, and worked on the funding and legal aspects to obtain the patent for the gutter clip.
She’s now focused on fundraising and other resources to expand their efforts across the river to Brazzaville.
“It’s not as big of a city, but it’s a different country so there are different politics at play there,” Borum said.
“We’re trying to think of it as an investment,” she said. “Like with solar, there is an investment up front, but in the end it will pay for itself.”
Learn more at the Terra Firma website, www.tfrain.org