<
https://www.wired.com/story/los-angeles-just-proved-how-spongy-a-city-can-be/>
"Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in
the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city
over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the
kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban
areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge
city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like
dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water
accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between
February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater,
enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season
in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest
to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more
rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt
and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at
the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are
the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water
supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other
infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible
to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen
around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners
are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead
of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small
cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC
Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration
of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does.
Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”"
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-human-rights-greece-education-burundi-reforestation-america/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
