‘To catch a raindrop’
“The water that you’re looking at would all percolate into the ground if it weren’t paved," Mark Hanna, a Department of Water & Power engineer, told Judith Lewis Mernit during a rainstorm last winter. To read Lewis Mernit's story on the lost rains of Los Angeles, click on the image to be taken to the website of the new literary quarterly Slake, or look for Slake from independent booksellers.
A January storm sweeps across the northern Pacific on the jet stream and hits Southern California with prodigious amounts of rain, writes Judith Lewis Mernit in the premier issue of Slake. It brings wind, too: bursts up to eighty miles per hour lop the tops off palm trees, waterspouts swirl, and a small tornado lifts catamarans thirty feet in the air. Here in Sun Valley, in the northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley, hail clatters so loudly on the …
Turf war continues
A proposal from Los Angeles Department of Water & Power Commissioners to switch LA’s lawn-watering ordinance from a two-day to a four-day-a-week opposite side of the street regime was rejected yesterday by the Los Angeles City Council, reports the Los Angeles Times. Instead, led by San Fernando Valley councilman Greig Smith, the council countered with a proposal that would allow three-day watering, though for shorter periods. This will be returned to DWP commissioners for consideration.
Last year, after the two-day rule was instituted by his own chamber, Smith publicly flouted it. “My grass is greener than it’s ever been,” Smith told the Daily News last September, a time of year that lawn is naturally brown. He defended his proposal yesterday by saying that it uses less water because of shorter cycles, with a total of 24 minutes watering a week instead of the two-day system’s 30 minutes.
The …
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