How much stormwater can we actually capture?
From January to February, Southern California went from quite dry to overwhelmingly wet, as a series of storms dropped more than a year’s worth of water in just a few weeks, loading up the L.A. River. Given that our dry months are coming up, just how much of that stormwater were we able to hold on to? And could we be doing better? The main way that we capture stormwater is by letting it soak into the Earth and travel through the soil into underground reservoirs. Back in the day, this would happen all across places like the L.A. Basin, but as we paved over much of the area, we lost much of our ability to sequester rainfall. That’s where spreading grounds, like those in the San Fernando Valley (seen below), come in.
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