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Saving Rain
Thu Apr 17, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Every year, Los Angeles spends billions to pipe in water from hundreds of miles away. And yet,
when it rains, the city lets millions of gallons of water rush through storm drains and into
the sea. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Environmentalists and government
officials are experimenting with ways to hang onto that water. From Los Angeles, Chris Richard
reports.
The typical LA school playground looks like a prison exercise yard, a shadeless expanse of
asphalt and concrete. But this schoolyard on the dusty fringe of Los Angeles has something
new this year: green grass.
That new grass is the result of two subterranean plastic domes that trap rainwater and let it
percolate back into the soil. It's called an infiltration field and is a joint project of the
Los Angeles water agency and Tree People, an environmentalist group. Tree People's David
O'Donnell says before this project went in, the surrounding neighborhood used to flood every
winter.
DO'D: Where you have urban development that pays no regard to natural cycles, you wind up
with areas being paved over, being unable to absorb any water, and causing flooding.
Now, in this neighborhood, it has a place to go. There are also proposals to build giant
catch-basins and underground cisterns nearby in LA's San Fernando Valley. O'Donnell says that
makes more sense than a concrete flood-control channel.
DO'D: If you can capture water where it falls or infiltrate it, you don't need flood
control.
But Jerry Gewe of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power says flash-flooding is part of
the natural pattern here.
JG: Back in the 1950s, when the Valley was far less developed, only about a third of the
water actually reached all the way down to the water table. Today, we don't have the open land
area to first store the water during the storm and then second, to allow it to go and join the
groundwater table.
Meanwhile, LA has another incentive to hold onto the water. Already this winter, the city's
been hit with fines for letting storm runoff pour into the Pacific.
That's correspondent Chris Richard. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount
Washington Observatory, supported by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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