Tag: drought

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I’ve been kicking myself for not checking out the neighboring building’s stormwater pool during the last spring rainstorm of April, figuring I wouldn’t get another chance to see it in the rain until winter. But over the last few weeks, two storms have blown into town from up north. One hit overnight, leaving behind only wet ground the next morning…and one hit in the middle of the day, making it easy to run next door.

Stormwater Pond 1

That actually doesn’t look half bad! Though the barrel embedded in the middle still looks kind of ugly.

I took one other shot where you can see water pouring out of one of the drainpipes.

Stormwater Pond 2

As for the rest of the office-to-hotel conversion:

  • The hotel has been open for a couple of months now, since the beginning of March (or maybe late February?)
  • So has the new Starbucks — the fourth within easy walking distance. At least this one seems to have normal inflated coffee prices, not hotel-markup-inflated coffee prices. And there’s an interesting piece of art inside.
  • The new second-floor elevator in the parking structure still looks like an upturned shipping container. I really expected them to cover it with something that looked nicer, or at least something that would blend with the rest of the structure. Though they did tear up and replace the sidewalk in front of it earlier this week, for no reason I could see.
  • Signs for Jersey Mike’s and ZPizza went up this morning, and I saw people loading kitchen equipment yesterday, so I’ll have a few more options for lunch soon. Update: Jersey Mike’s opened the last week of June.

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landscape-pit

I’m still not sure how this new landscaping is supposed to work. My best guess is that the lower area is supposed to collect runoff and seepage from the surrounding lawn and other plants (and the street gutter behind me, interestingly enough) in order to reduce water usage and actually do something with water that would otherwise be sent into storm drains — a good idea in drought-stricken California.

There does seem to be a drain so that it won’t totally fill up in the rain, like it did a few months ago before they had all the plants in: Continue reading →

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Researchers simulated a 70-year mega-drought and came up with ways that California could survive without the economy collapsing, emptying out the state, or even abandoning agriculture. We’d have to change the way we store and distribute water, recycle more wastewater, do groundwater replenishment, prioritize different (and less thirsty) crops, and of course cut down on our water use. It would hurt, and smaller, rural towns would be worse hit than cities (which is already happening — there are places out in Tulare county, for instance, where wells are drying up and homes no longer have running water). But the simulation suggests it could be done — and it’s a good idea to plan for this, just in case, rather than relying on the drought to end in a year or two. Geologic evidence suggests that decades-long droughts used to be the norm, and of course who knows what “normal” is going to be over the next century.

Another article details how Southern Californians have been changing water use this summer: letting lawns die, using more reclaimed water, draining fountains and converting commercial landscaping. The average Los Angeles resident has cut back to 89 gallons per day.

I can’t say I’ve seen much change in my area since I started noticing the occasional lawn replaced with native plants back at the start of the year. Maybe a few more native gardens or scraggly lawns, but not a sea change. Katie does a lot more walking, though, and she’s noticed that a lot of houses just have dirt. Apartments mostly still have lawns, but at least that’s more people per square foot of grass. Unfortunately nobody wants to wash the smears of dog poop off of the sidewalk.

Swimming Pool Under Construction.Meanwhile, the office building to hotel conversion next door to my workplace has embarked on what they’re replacing that giant lawn with: a swimming pool. A sign out front proclaims an early 2015 opening. Someone’s optimistic about water for next year.

On a related note, the Irvine Company is planning to donate what’s left of the Irvine Ranch to the county as open space. Good!

I’ve lamented the loss of both open space and local farmland over the past twenty years or so as more and more of Orange County has been paved over with houses and shopping malls. Since moving to the South Bay, I’ve seen the potential endgame. “Open space” out here consists of the occasional empty block that’s been set aside, or a hillside that’s too steep to build on conveniently. Palos Verdes has a bit more, but it’s filling in. At least the Portuguese Bend area is likely to stay clear, since the ground isn’t stable enough to build on.

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Dried-up lawn Lawn gradient

The office building next door to work is being converted into a hotel, and the lawn has become a staging area for the renovation work. They’ve turned off the sprinklers, leaving the lawn around the building dried into very short straw and producing an interesting gradient in the transition from watered to unwatered.

I kind of hope they’ll put in something less water-intensive than a new lawn when they’re done, but I’m not counting on it.

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Since speculating idly on replacing roadside and median grass with more drought tolerant landscaping, I’ve started noticing spots around town that have done just that — some of them on my daily commute! An office building here, a mini mall there, an island, or the sidewalk strip in front of a single house. Not a sea change, but a beginning, or at least an experiment.

I’ve also spotted a few more houses that have taken out their lawns in favor of wood chips or rocks and a less-thirsty garden. Maybe it’s the variety, maybe it’s just that the people who’ve put in the effort to convert their lawns have actually, you know, put some effort into it, but they actually look better than a lot of the lawns out there. (As renters, we don’t really have the option of replacing the lawn, but we’re trying to be smarter about our patio and the strip we manage alongside a walkway.)

Spiky shrubs, lavender flowers, agave, and tufts of scrub grass are all common. Some of the roadside strips look like well organized chaparral. Birds of Paradise are common too, but I’m not sure how well they handle low-water conditions.

On the other hand, none of that helps if you keep watering like it’s grass, or use sprinklers that water the street and sidewalk as much as the soil around the plants. Just on my lunchtime walks I’ve found patches of grass where the dirt is always on the verge of becoming mud, and driveways that always seem to have puddles below them. Someone didn’t get the memo.

And then there are the strips of bare dirt that remind me why ground cover of one sort or another is necessary: erosion has left concrete plugs sticking up out of the ground around fence posts, or brick walls leaning out toward the street.

I suppose you could go the route I saw along one street: fill the island with concrete and paint it green. But that’s not only uglier than dirt (literally), it has the critical disadvantage that when it does rain, the water doesn’t even have a chance to sink in. And we desperately need to convert that rain to groundwater instead of flushing it all out to sea.

Landscaping