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Pierce Says Think Again if You Believe El Niño Means No Water Worries

The last 12 months have been wetter than normal in California. And the traditionally wet season of mid-October to April arrives with predictions of a normally rainy El Niño climate pattern. Does that mean state water officials can take it easy because we’ll be seeing another robust Sierra Nevada snowpack, rapidly filling reservoirs and no need for drought mitigation measures? Unfortunately, no, said Greg Pierce, the director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab based at UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation. As he told LAist, “We may be right back in the situation we were before this last wet year in a year or two.” If the rains do come over the next few months, that’s an opportunity for conservation. “That should set us up again to avoid desperation for maybe, instead of one to two years, maybe three to five years,” he said.


 

Pierce on Solutions to Mitigate Floods in San Francisco

Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to SFGATE about San Francisco’s lack of preparation to prevent flooding after supercharged storms. The city’s sewage infrastructure is extremely antiquated, combining raw sewage and stormwater runoff into a single system. San Francisco’s vast concrete landscape also enables flooding as it doesn’t allow for any stormwater to absorb into the cityscape. Creating a landscape that allows for such drainage will help reduce the chances of flooding. “Reducing paved area is the biggest factor we need to take into account that we haven’t historically,” Pierce said. In addition, about 4,400 of the city’s 25,000 catch basins have been “adopted,” but they are not regularly cleaned by volunteers. “It’s great if neighborhoods and local communities can take additional ownership of unclogging issues,” Pierce said. But he stressed the importance of having centralized maintenance of the system in order to keep the basins clean.