* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
When the monsoon season downpours come, my neighbours pull out a large pipe to connect the rain gutter on their roof to several large waist-high cement urns in their yard. On drier days, they have water to wash and water their plants, and though we live on a small island surrounded by the pollution of Bangkok, they even drink the water they collect.
"It’s cleaner because it has been filtered by the sky. Piped water has to be cleaned at the plant - how can that beat being cleaned by the sky? This is pure,” 60-year-old Preecha Lokim, the grandfather next door tells me, pointing to their nearly two-decade-old urns.
As climate change triggers more severe droughts, floods and storms across Asia, traditional rainwater collection could be one solution to the shortages of drinking, washing and irrigation water disasters often bring.
To naysayers who argue the rainwater must be polluted with all the industry and pollution around Bangkok, Preecha grumbles about the dead dogs floating in the canals of the metropolitan waterworks and the numerous steps it takes to get that water to a potable state - the chlorine, the filtration. The stench from Bangkok’s canals is sometimes unbearable.
“How can that be clean?” he asks. Yet he and his family say they are among the few in this neighbourhood who still collect rainwater. While the Lokim family adheres to the centuries-old tradition, others have shifted to piped water.
Yet rainwater appears to be making a comeback in some parts of the country affected by drought this year. In southern Trang province, the Thai-language newspaper Daily News reported that one urn-maker saw orders more than double this dry season, from 300 a month in November to 700 a month since February.
WATER MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
In the aftermath of disasters, aid agencies haul bottled water and enormous tanker trucks full of water to distribute to affected people. But rainwater collection could be a more sustainable response, especially in countries with good rainfall.
“In places that have rainfall, it should be a solution. At least you would have a reserve. Rain is clean, as long as you are trained to not use the first and second flush, but then it’s good,” said Wilas Techo, vice president of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), a Thai NGO that has installed about 20,000 rainwater collection systems in poor communities across the country since the mid-1980s.
“Thailand is not a dry country. When it rains here, every region gets high rainfall. The problem with Thailand is only water management and having water reservoirs so we have water in the dry season.”
Collecting rainwater helps people “survive during the dry season independently” without relying on the government, Wilas told AlertNet.
“Not having water for one day is worse than missing food for a day. If people can become self sufficient, then they can help themselves, at least to drink, instead of saving money to buy water. When there is free water from nature, why not use that?”
In the 1980s, PDA led a campaign to install rainwater-harvesting systems for homes and schools in poor communities, particularly in the northeast, which suffers months of drought each year. They also trained some villagers to make water-collection urns.
For an eight-person household with a decent cement roof catchment area, PDA built an 11.3 cubic-metre cement tank, 3.6 metres tall and 2 metres in diameter. This, they calculated, would be enough during the five-month dry season for drinking, washing, cooking, bathing and watering a few plants.
Most villages across Thailand have piped water systems, either from a groundwater system, which is still in use in parts of the island where I live, or from the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority, which installed piping to reach my house two years ago.
With piped water, as well as the availability of bottled water and potable-water filling machines, rainwater is falling by the wayside in communities like mine.
Since 2010, PDA has been sharing its rainwater harvesting knowledge in rural parts of Laos, though they’re starting with giant urns first, because the communities where they are work have mostly thatch-roofed homes.
They now want to share their 30 years of rainwater collection expertise with communities in Cambodia and Myanmar - places with a climate much like Thailand’s.
COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S WATER
The water from my neighbours’ urns tastes pure.
They hold off collecting for the first few rains, to let the water wash from the roof the bird and rodent droppings, dead leaves and dust that collected over the dry season. Then when a big rain comes, Preecha waits a few minutes - to let the gutters and pipes get a brief clean - before connecting the pipe to their urn. A big rain across a decent-sized rooftop can easily fill an urn in an hour.
They wait a year for the debris in the water to settle, and then use a rubber tube to vacuum the gunk from the bottom of the urn.
Somnuk fills a pitcher from the urn and pours the water through a cloth to put it into bottles that go into their refrigerator.
For several days during the 2011 floods that inundated more than a third of Thailand’s provinces, my water was turned off because the waterworks plant that services my community was hit. I eyed my neighbours’ urns with envy. The rains were plenty, obviously, and their urns were full.
My husband and I left the faucet on, so that we could hear when the water came back on, and as soon as the tap sputtered, we filled every container we could with water to drink, brush our teeth, cook, wash dishes and bathe. Fortunately we have a dry composting toilet, so no flush water was needed.
When the floods ended, I vowed I would figure out a rainwater-harvesting system. I missed the 2012 monsoon, and the next round of rains is coming soon.
