Government starting to use floodwater well

By Ruth Galanter, Los Angeles Daily News
Article Last Updated: 02/06/2008

Only a few weeks ago, the major water news was that there isn't enough. Suddenly a few storms swept in, and now the issue is not where will our water come from; it's what happens to the water once it's here.

There is bad news and good news.

The bad news is that most of the water that has poured down on Los Angeles will flow out to the ocean without doing a thing to replenish our supply of usable water. Some will be retained in our yards and in reservoirs. But a lot more will swish down our streets and off our parking lots and hillsides into storm drains and flood-control basins, then be lost to us.
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Part of the problem is that the agency responsible for supplying a community with water is almost never the same agency responsible for dealing with wastewater, whether that's the water left after sewage is treated or the water that flows down hillsides and streets - the stuff our land can't handle after becoming saturated.

In the city of Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power is responsible for water coming in, and the Bureau of Sanitation is responsible for water going out. The DWP is a quasi-independent agency. The Bureau of Sanitation is a division of the Department of Public Works. Its funding and its management are completely separate.

For generations, government policy has been focused on getting rid of rainwater, treating it as wastewater rather than as a renewable resource. Local building codes generally require that buildings have drainage systems to get rainwater off the property so that it can't undermine the buildings or become stagnant and breed diseases. Local flood-control agencies and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have spent enormous sums building concrete channels to hasten the rainwater's flight to the ocean.
That's the bad news. But there is actually also good news.

Thanks largely to pressure from community and environmental activists, there are many examples of attempts to conserve rainwater and floodwater. ***

But the most spectacular reversal of generations of wasteful government policies is still to come. Thanks largely to Andy Lipkis of TreePeople and Dorothy Green of every water organization you can think of, a remarkable array of government agencies is preparing to reverse course. Instead of building more storm drains in Sun Valley and removing floodwater, the sanitation agencies of the city and county, the DWP and the Corps of Engineers are preparing to construct holding facilities, possibly in some of the former quarries, to retain what rainwater we get.

This remarkable breakthrough is part of a trend toward the creation of "watershed councils" that look at where the water comes from and where it goes. Already, several schools and parks have lawns watered from underground cisterns that catch the water running off surrounding streets.

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