Stormy water
After the Los Angeles Board of Public Works delayed its decision on the Low Impact Development ordinance designed to curb the flow of contaminated stormwater into the Santa Monica and San Pedro Bays, city’s Bureau of Sanitation has announced a new community meeting to “provide input” into the proposed ordinance. When: Tuesday, December 1, 2009, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm. Where: City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation Media Technical Center, 2714 Media Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90065. Who: Los Angeles homeowners, developers, environmental groups and all interested parties are encouraged to attend. Please direct questions and your RSVP to lastormwater@lacity.org. For upcoming LID-related posts go to: Team Effort blog.…
The Dry Garden: On sage and size
MANY gardens go without sage in California but at the cost of soul. Sage is to the West what lavender is to France.
Sage, or in botanical terms salvia, has it all: Its pungent aromas contain the signature scent of the Western chaparral. The silvers, grays and greens of its foliage anchor the local Craftsman color wheel, and the long-running show of flowers come in a spectrum of white to pink to mauve to scarlet to purple to indigo to sky blue.
Many sages have long had medicinal and culinary applications, but for modern Californians it’s a balm to the eyes. A felt-like quality to the foliage, combined with a loose-branching habit, allows sage to diffuse the harshest midday sunshine rather than reflect it. Sages do not need fertilizer, and in fact they shrivel at the suggestion. Few other plants …
Image of the day: Mediterranean climate zones
THIS image of the day from NASA’s Earth Observatory takes composite pictures of global cloud cover for the month of October 2009 to examine what cloud presence alone says about the land below.
According to NASA, the starkest examples are in areas where dry land is bordered by ocean. Sure enough, peeping out from beneath the clouds are the world’s five mediterranean climate zones, which in addition to California include part of the Chilean coast into western Argentina, southwestern Australia, the Mediterranean basin and southwestern South Africa.
Mediterranean climate zones have unique floras adapted to surviving on winter rains then hunkering down into dormancy during prolonged dry seasons. For Californians, who for the last century have grown wet-climate plants such as turf grass with imported water, a switch to native and mediterranean climate zone plants is seen as an essential step as global warming and population growth threaten the …
Item 5
Updated 11/19/2009 9.21am PST
ITEM 5 on the agenda for this Thursday’s board meeting of the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls for the directors to take an October 15, 2009 decision by a Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison to the state Supreme Court.
The Robison decision deemed a 2008 award of water to Las Vegas and the SNWA by the State Engineer of Nevada from three Lincoln County valleys “arbitrary, oppressive and a manifest abuse of discretion.” It then vacated the award for water in the three valleys that are the key first staging grounds of a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline that Las Vegas plans to run into the heart of the state to pump rural groundwater.
Why did the judge rule the way he did? According to Robison, the water — 18,755 acre feet of it a year (or enough for 37,000 homes) — isn’t there. “The state engineer …
The week that was, 11/8-14/2009
A line of scrapers works the ground. No water has been secured for the south metro reservoir, and Western Slope interests are balking at proposals to pump water over the mountains. (John Prieto, The Denver Post)
An armada of giant yellow earthmovers on the prairie south of Denver is racing to dig one of Colorado’s biggest water-supply reservoirs in decades — a hole 180 feet deep across 1,400 acres — designed to wean suburbs off waning aquifers. But the water to fill this reservoir? Not yet secured. — “Reservoir under construction south of Denver but there’s no water to hold,” Denver Post, November 10, 2009…
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