Learning to Save Something for a Drier Day
Under the baseball and kickball fields at the Open Charter Elementary School in Westchester sits the latest in campus conservation: a 110,000-gallon cistern that captures, cleans and stores water to irrigate the campus.
The project, which began with TreePeople, a Los Angeles environmental group, and involves several agencies, is intended to reduce the amount of water released into storm drains and ultimately into the ocean.
Four-thousand gallons of water gushed from a tank truck in the parking lot of the school Thursday in a demonstration of how the conservation program works.
Water is collected during the rainy season and used during the dry season, said David O’Donnell, a TreePeople project associate. When the cistern runs out of water, the school can tap into the city’s water supply.
That has not been a problem this year.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t overflowed,” said Principal Robert Burke.
To begin the program, 40% of the asphalt on the campus was removed to make room for grass, gardens and 150 trees: coast live oaks, sycamores, liquidambars, redwoods, willows, cedars and alders.
“This school was built in the 1940s, and it’s typical of a LAUSD campus in that it was nice, but it had a lot of concrete,” said Jennifer Scott-Lifland, a certified arborist and tree care manager for TreePeople.
When the sun is out, asphalt and concrete absorb the heat and can raise temperatures by five to 10 degrees, creating a heat-island effect, said Chip English, community outreach manager with TreePeople.
“It has this compounding effect because the hotter it gets, the more air-conditioning we use and the more pollution we create,” English said.
Andy Lipkis, founder and president of TreePeople, wrote the grant proposal nine years ago. He said working with so many agencies -- the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, the County Regional Park and Open Space District, the Los Angeles City Bureau of Sanitation’s Watershed Protection Division -- slowed the project but that he is pleased it is now operational.
With a $500,000 grant from the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, the cistern was in place in December, just in time to capture the abundant rainfall that has fallen since January.
At Thursday’s demonstration, a one-pint jar of murky water polluted with oil, trash and dust displayed what goes into the ocean after it rains.
The city of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation reported that in a 0.45-inch rain, approximately 3.8 billion gallons of runoff flow into the Pacific Ocean from the Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek, Santa Monica Bay and Dominguez Channel watersheds.
Water is a “precious resource that Los Angeles is hemorrhaging,” Lipkis said, adding that about 80 billion gallons of water that could have been captured and reused went into the ocean during this winter’s storms.
Burke said the cistern and vegetation provide an educational component for the students because the school’s curriculum is centered on environmental themes.
“Learning happens best within a context,” Burke said. “The kids will carry this experience with them so when their kids go to school, they will be advocating for such projects.”
Fourth-grader Tyler Hildreth helped plant some of the trees, which he thinks are beautiful. His favorite area is the grassy kickball field.
“Most schools barely have any trees,” said the 10-year-old. “All schools should have a cistern because it’s amazing how we have so many trees and most of the kids planted them.”
Fourth-grader Hannah Provisor, 9, said Open Charter “was a change from my old school....[It] had no trees and no grass, and we were looking for a school that had grass.”
Similar upcoming TreePeople projects include a 250,000-gallon cistern in Coldwater Canyon Park, a retrofitted home in South Los Angeles, a system under a soccer field at a Pacoima elementary school and a neighborhood project in Sun Valley.
