To prevent flood damage caused by increasingly unpredictable rain seasons, the University of Saskatchewan is looking into more sustainable ways to pave its walk and roadways.

“We have been investigating paving systems that are permeable,” said Colin Tennent, the university’s architecture and associate vice-president of facilities management.

He believes that as construction and the amount of hard surfaces on campus increases, the university will need to find new ways to remove excess rain water.

Wes Polowski, assistant manager for the university’s grounds department, said that flooding hasn’t traditionally been a major worry on  campus.

“We’ve never really had a whole bunch of flooding on campus,” he said, adding that the university keeps its sewer lines clean and that spring runoff is not a worry because it hauls its snow away.

“They have improved some of the drainage system over the years and it’s only if we have a really big downpour that our system can’t take it,” he said.

However, as Tennent pointed out, this drainage system will be forced to take more and more each year as the amount of hard surfaces increase. With less soil to absorb rainwater, flooding becomes more and more likely, leading to the need for more absorptive paths.

Before installing a paving system university-wide, a pilot segment will need to be installed. The pilot “would test the efficacy of the system, if it works well in our climate and if it makes sense for us from a financial and sustainable point of view,” Tennent explained.

Permeable pavement allows water to move through it and be absorbed by the soil below, preventing water build-up on the surface.

While the university hasn’t specified which type of permeable surface it’s looking into, there are numerous options.

Some types of pavement allow water to run directly through pores in the concrete or asphalt, while others are movable tiles that allow water to be absorbed between each piece.

Tennent was very excited about the prospect of movable tiles.

There are “tremendous mechanized systems that will pick up hundreds of pieces at a go,” he said, “either through suction or some sort of friction.”

This allows for maintenance and construction underneath the surface without the high cost of repaving.

“It just picks them up vertically and moves them off to a sort of staging area and you just go in and do the excavation that you need.”

He emphasized that while they sound promising the university is only investigating these paving options and has not moved to start constructing them.

Campus’s recent construction projects — College Quarter residences and Academic Health Sciences — are building storm water retention ponds to prevent flooding.

“Most of the time it’s just a depression in the landscape that fills up when there is a heavy rain,” said Andrew Wallace, architectural design coordinator for FMD. The ponds would then dry out through evaporation and absorption.

Place Riel, unfortunately, has limited space and is surrounded by concrete surfaces.

“There is not a great opportunity for us to obtain water in ponds in that area,” said Tennent.

The university has also started building green roofs — like the roof on top of the law building — to absorb rain water.