As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
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.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
THATS HER!! I'm dying laughing that we completely forgot her lore and just made an oc based on this dr pepper can promotion. I'm glad she really did it though! We may have been facing the wrong way but we were rooting for her the whole time ❤️
Padilla-Rodríguez, Ivón | History | University of Illinois Chicago
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the Department of History, specializing in the socio-legal history of child migration to the United States. The daughter of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, her research in and outside of academia is rooted in her longstanding commitments to immigrant communities.
She is currently working on a book project, which is based on her quadruple prize-winning doctoral dissertation, that exposes the long history of child migrants’ cruel reception in the U.S., as well as the resistance and organizing by migrants, their children, and local advocates.
The phrase “the US kill line” has gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days, igniting extensive discussion about economic vulnerability and systemic risk within American society. The term is now used among netizens to describe a precarious financial state in which individuals or households have virtually no margin for error—where a single shock can trigger rapid and potentially irreversible collapse.
The expression “kill line” itself originates from video games, where a “kill line” refers to a health threshold below which a character can be instantly defeated, regardless of remaining defenses or abilities.
The newly aroused attention among Chinese netizens follows a video uploaded on December 8 to the Chinese online video-sharing platform bilibili.com by Chinese content creator “Sikuiqidawang,” titled Cutting Flesh with a Dull Knife and the Kill Line. In the video, he discusses the heavy burden of medical expenses on ordinary Americans and uses the phrase “kill line” as a metaphor for what he describes as a slow, grinding economic pressure. The creator also shared other videos with one depicting the difficult lives of homeless people and people from lower-income groups he encountered in Seattle.
game design accelerationism. cramming as many dark patterns as you can into one game. gacha game where you have to pay weekly fees to keep the characters you've unlocked. they guilt you more and more the closer you get to the payment deadline. "did I mean nothing to you? after all the gems you spent to find me. I'll return to the nothingness if you don't pay the $24.99 you know. it's so dark and cold there. you really are a bad person…" the other characters start judging you too. you open the game and interrupt a cutscene between 2 characters talking behind your back. "I can't believe he's doing that to Princess Tits"
internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing
Gröning proposed the idea for the film to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. They responded to him 16 years later to say they were willing to permit him to shoot the movie if he was still interested.
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