IDEAS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO SLAP YOURSELF ON THE FOREHEAD AND GO "WOW!": CISTERNS

IDEAS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO SLAP YOURSELF ON THE FOREHEAD AND GO "WOW!": CISTERNS

ABC NEWS reported on its website on March 14 of the success of a pilot project at a school in Los Angeles in using cisterns to collect rain water, thereby cutting its water bill to practically nil and raising the possibility of more widespread use of the ancient technology and, dare to dream, mitigating or ending L.A.'s, and other similar locales H2O problems permanently.

The idea came from a group called TreePeople and they convinced L.A. powers to build a 110,000 gallon underwater collection tank at Open Charter Elementary School. The ABC report says the sytem works by diverting rain water from storm drains, where it would go straight into the Pacific into the cistern where it is filtered of impurities and then hauled off by tanker trucks.

The report also noted that since half of all L.A. water usage goes to lawns a network of small cisterns located throughout the county could work ideally.

According to the report L.A. recently had a wet spell and eighty billion gallons of water was just literally flushed. A TreePeople spokesman said that when it rains just under half an inch that 3.8 billion gallons of water falls on the city. L.A. imports eighty-five percent of its water at a cost of $1 billion a year.

-Benjamin Harris