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Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. At the same time, climate change is supercharging rainstorms, counterintuitively enough: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 6 to 7 percent more water, meaning there’s often more moisture available for a storm to dump as rain. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect —the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night.
Or read this on Wired