Rain Brainstorm

That wasn’t a rain cloud over Rozella Hall’s head that sent her scurrying for an umbrella Thursday in South-Central Los Angeles.

It was the man on her roof with the fire hose--the one helping create an artificial thunderstorm over her West 50th Street home as part of a water conservation project being studied by local and federal officials.

The yard surrounding Hall’s 70-year-old clapboard bungalow has been turned into a colorfully landscaped catch basin. Officials figure the yard will trap rain runoff and let it soak into the ground instead of wastefully flowing into storm drains that empty into the ocean.

A coalition of federal, state and municipal agencies chipped in $50,000 to create what experts say could become a prototype for backyard projects all over Los Angeles.

The water-recycling idea was proposed by environmentalist Andy Lipkis, founder of Los Angeles-based TreePeople. He suggests that diverting rain runoff into the ground will boost the city’s underground water supply while at the same time preventing flooding along the Los Angeles River.

The collection system at Hall’s house includes rain gutters and downspouts that empty into lawn areas and into a specially designed cistern system.

The grassy lawn sections are surrounded by slightly raised berms. The tiny embankments trap runoff until it can percolate through layers of mulch, compost and soil and into the underground water table.

Box-like cisterns hold 3,600 gallons of runoff. They are designed to store the water until the rainy season ends. Then it can be pumped out and used to irrigate the lawn.

Lipkis said the cost of installing similar recycling systems could be reduced to about $10,000 per home if a manufacturer can be found to mass-produce the cisterns.

But homeowners can immediately begin using the simple mulch-layering and berm-building techniques for next to no cost if they are willing to wield a pick and shovel in their yards.

To spur interest, the TreePeople group will offer tours of Hall’s yard during the next eight months.

But those demonstrations won’t include the artificial storm created Thursday by a tanker truck. During their simulated cloudburst, workers pumped 2,000 gallons onto Hall’s roof.

To Lipkis’ dismay, the spraying was done with drinking water, not recycled sewage effluent. “We couldn’t get a permit to use waste water,” he shrugged.

Hall, a 57-year-old former bookkeeper who has lived in the house for 25 years, said she doesn’t mind what could become a parade of looky-loos tromping over her lawn and around the drought-resistant shrubs planted as part of the project.

She’s a longtime supporter of TreePeople, Hall said.

But more important, she said, “I’m a people person.”

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Operation Waterlog

The demonstration house in South-Central Los Angeles was designed to work with nature’s cyclesof flood and drought by trapping and reusing rainwater.

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1. Gutters and downspouts carry the rain to the lawn and into the cisterns. The water is pumped out by an electric pump on a timer-system to irrigate the yard.

2. Runoff from the roof drains into depressions in the yard. The “sunken garden” holds rainwater until it can be absorbed into the ground. The grading can be placed over coarse aggregate rock for a higher infiltration rate.

Source: TreePeople