By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer
"By turning our yards into rain gardens and our streets into recharge facilities, we can ensure clean water for the future," says Nancy Steele, executive director of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council. As evidence, she presents the recently completed Elmer Avenue Neighborhood Retrofit Project in Sun Vallley. The project was initiated and managed by the Council and involved many partners including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the City of Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The project transformed a neighborhood with streets subject to frequent flooding--not hard to imagine from the image immediately below--into one that recharges 16 acre-feet of groundwater into the aquifer annually. Just as importantly, the improvement keeps polluted water out of our rivers and ocean.
Plus, as you can see below, the completed project also resulted in prettier, more drought-tolerant, and more walkable streets for the Sun Valley neighborhood.
The swales between the sidewalk and the street all along Elmer Avenue harvest rainwater and irrigation runoff, and the vegetation and soil in the swales filters out pollutants in the water before it percolates into the acquifer.
Additional swales were worked into the new landscape designs as the before and after images below show, resulting in more interesting as well as more functional front yards.
Below is an image of one of the swales doing its work, capturing street runoff during a rain-storm.
And here, during construction, is an image of the infiltration gallery under the street that captures the water for groundwater recharge.
You can hear more about the Elmer Avenue Project and get a guided tour of it on June 30th at the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council's symposium on Decentralized Stormwater Management at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. Details and RSVP here.
I hope to be there myself. This is the direction we need to be headed.
