“I looked at the really simple scenario for Los Angeles,” said Andy Lipkis, president of TreePeople. “We receive half the water we need in rainfall, and we throw it away. Then we spend hundreds of millions to import water. We challenged the Army Corps to look at alternatives.”

Lipkis was among those who believed that sustainable watershed management was technically possible and would be economically beneficial.

So TreePeople staged an experiment to demonstrate that “very simple changes, easy to do, have huge implications,” said Lipkis. On a clear day in August, they produced a 100-year storm. “That was a critical change point, especially for Public Works officials.” DPW decided to work with TreePeople to retrofit an entire flood-prone subwatershed of the Los Angeles River, allocating $42 million that had been earmarked for a conventional flood control project.

The full text of this article is in the print edition of Coast & Ocean.

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