Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

By -
https://www.wired.com/story/los-angeles-just-proved-how-spongy-a-city-can-be/

By MATT SIMON, Wired. 

Excerpt: ...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. ...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. ...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.... 

Popular posts from this blog

Lost history of Antarctica revealed in octopus DNA

By -
https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-history-antarctica-revealed-octopus-dna By ERIK STOKSTAD .  Excerpt: Some 100,000 years ago, scientists believe Antarctica’s massive western ice sheet collapsed, temporarily opening waterways between a trio of seas surrounding the continent. New evidence for that scenario comes from a surprising source: octopus DNA. ...About 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, a warm spell called the last interglacial gave our planet a brief break in between several million years of ice ages. The average temperature of the planet was about 0.5°C warmer than it is today—and climate projections predict it will be again within decades. The global sea level was also 5 meters to 10 meters higher than current levels. Many scientists believe  the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and consequent melting could have been a primary reason . ...The findings are consistent with growing geological evidence supporting the ice sheet collapse....
Read more

An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes

By -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/ By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and  destroyed more than 2.1 million homes . The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are
Read more

Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease

By -
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/health/malaria-climate-change.html By  Stephanie Nolen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year,  the World Health Organization said on Thursday , an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children. Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program. In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission....
Read more