• Home
  • Motorcycles
  • Electric Motorcycles
  • 3 wheelers
  • FUV Electric 3 wheeler
  • Shop
  • Listings

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest creative news from CycleNews about two, three wheelers and Electric vehicles.

What's Hot

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person

MSI Titan 18 HX AI Review: The Ultimate Gaming Laptop

Cortech Versa-Flo Jacket Review

Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Home
  • Motorcycles
  • Electric Motorcycles
  • 3 wheelers
  • FUV Electric 3 wheeler
  • Shop
  • Listings
Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest
Cycle News
Submit Your Ad
Cycle News
You are at:Home » Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be
Electric Motorcycles

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

cycleBy cycleFebruary 19, 202403 Mins Read
Share Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email


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.

As the American West and other regions dry out, they’re searching for ways to produce more water themselves, instead of importing it by aqueduct. (That strategy includes, by the way, recycling toilet water into drinking water so cities reduce water usage in the first place.) At the same time, climate change is supercharging rainstorms, counterintuitively enough: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 6 to 7 percent more water, meaning there’s often more moisture available for a storm to dump as rain. Indeed, studies have found that the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers, like the one that just hit LA, are getting wetter.



Source link

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleBluesky’s Future Is Social Media’s Past
Next Article Do Africa’s latest battery-swapping stations put the US to shame?
cycle
  • Website

Related Posts

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person

June 2, 2025

MSI Titan 18 HX AI Review: The Ultimate Gaming Laptop

June 2, 2025

Cortech Versa-Flo Jacket Review

June 2, 2025
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Demo
Top Posts

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person

June 2, 2025

The urban electric commuter FUELL Fllow designed by Erik Buell is now opening orders | thepack.news | THE PACK

July 29, 2023

2024 Yamaha Ténéré 700 First Look [6 Fast Facts For ADV Riding]

July 29, 2023
Stay In Touch
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • TikTok
  • WhatsApp
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
Latest Reviews

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest tech news from FooBar about tech, design and biz.

Demo
Most Popular

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person

June 2, 2025

The urban electric commuter FUELL Fllow designed by Erik Buell is now opening orders | thepack.news | THE PACK

July 29, 2023

2024 Yamaha Ténéré 700 First Look [6 Fast Facts For ADV Riding]

July 29, 2023
Our Picks

The Secret Alchemy of Making Ice Cream

AI Thinks It Cracked Kryptos. The Artist Behind It Says No Chance

TCL RayNeo Air 2 XR Glasses Review: Big Virtual Screen, Blurry

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest news from CycleNews about two, three wheelers and Electric vehicles.

© 2025 cyclenews.blog
  • Home
  • About us
  • Get In Touch
  • Shop
  • Listings
  • My Account
  • Submit Your Ad
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Stock Ticker

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.