Tom Spellman: Good Morning, I’m Tom Spellman with Dave Wilson Nursery. Today we’re here in Beverly Hills, California at the Tree People Headquarters and I’m here with my friend Chris M. Hoff. She is the head of the Tree People’s Education Department, training the public how to grow trees properly and today Chris is going to tell us some of the inner city issues that she has to deal with, mainly water.
Chris M. Hoff: So here in Los Angeles, one of the biggest issues we have has to do with water and water capture. For most of us, we pay high water bills because most of our water comes from other areas of California. Only fifteen percent of the water we use here in Los Angeles comes from ground water sources. So one of the goals we have is to see if we can capture more of that water. When it rains here, that water hits hard concrete and asphalt surfaces and becomes run off. It carries all, whatever is on the land. Typically, land pollution, right into a storm drain system that head straight tot the ocean making that water unusable and filthy.
So what we try and do here is we want to show the public that there are other alternatives to importing water and that would be kind of opening up the land and allow the water to actually soak on in and get into those ground water sources. So what I’m going to show you right now is what we’ve done here in our Tree People Parking grove.
Areas of our parking lot over here have been opened up where we have gravel. Probably one of the most inexpensive ways to have a permeable surface, so what happens is when it rains here. You’ve got water that’s allowed to actually make its way down into the ground as suppose to running on off into the street. To end this parking lot, what were trying to do at Tree People is actually capture as much of that water as possible through a variety of drains because what we have here on our side is a 216,000 gallon underground system. So what you see is our parking lot here is actually at an angle. Everything flows into a variety of drains, this one here you have a French drain over here so all that water is captured before its allowed to get out into the street.
What we have here is a gravel trench drain. A very simple drainage system, underneath this gravel is actually kind of a trench that’s dug out. There is a pipe that’s laid into this trench that has holes on the bottom of it. And so when water drains off to the parking lot, it hits the gravel, it permeates through the gravel and goes down underneath that trench and then fills up the pipe from the bottom. That pipe then directs the water into our system.
Another feature here on Tree Peoples parking lot has to do with heat island effect. We call this actually our parking lot is what we call our parking grove because we planted trees down the center and all along the edge we have large trees that will create a canopy of shade to cool down not only the parking lot but your cars. Another feature that we do in this parking lot is we’ve covered the parking lot with a light colored surface. This light colored surface on parking lots as well as on the roofs of homes helps to prevent heat island effect because what happens is the energy from the sun comes down and when its in a light colored surface it actually reflects out.
On typical asphalt black top like this here for demonstration purposes is you’ve got black hot surfaces. This black surfaces take in that energy from the sun and they actually absorb it and they absorb then that absorbed heat then creates this heat almost eight to ten degrees hotter in the entire area because of that absorbed heat and black is an absorbing color. So by just covering your surfaces with a light color as it goes to a black absorbing color makes all the difference in temperature around not only the parking lot but the surrounding buildings.
Tom Spellman: Chris, I think that this water reclamation system that you guys have installed here at Tree People is just a phenomenal system and I’m really intrigued by them and I want you explain to me in detail exactly what we’ve got going on here.
Chris M. Hoff: All right, well we are standing on top of a 216,000 gallon system. This is a giant water tank. We are about almost approximately the center so 15 feet down but you know it goes 15 feet down below us and were about 17 feet in diameter circle all around this entire area. This tank is what holds that water that runs off of the property in the parking lot as well as the top of those buildings. So all the one that run off, all the drains connect to this system, now this system then takes that water and the water is aerated before it is sent out to all areas of the park where you’ll see series of drip irrigation hoses all around the landscape. And so it’s the water from this system that’s used to irrigate our landscape.
Tom Spellman: So this system irrigates a 100% of your landscape her and its also here for safety purposes and were going to do a little walk through and see some demonstrations of other types of water reclamation, so lets take off and do that.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services