It’s a Greight Week for Progress

By Ricardo Patlan

My favorite part about week greight is that you can never really says it is bad. Unless you get decked by a frEight train, or a horrible pun, then it is all bad. Ok, I apologize. Anyways, as you may have guessed, it’s week eight at UCLA and Resilience team certainly has a lot on their pleight – YUM!

Things are really starting to pick up. Thanks to our hard work, patience, and productive and fruitful relationship with Tom Lukas, I think it’s reasonable to say that the light at the end of the tunnel is finally starting to tease. We have managed to settle on a sight for our storm water capture project (parking structure 9), we have done preliminary measurements, research, organized our objectives, endured emailing crusades, and isolated all the people we need to consult to get this project done. Basically, we have good direction now. Hopefully it takes us streight to our goals. However, the highlight of this week has to be our meeting with representatives from Rainwater Harvest Systems.

This past Tuesday we met with Jeff Fuller and Scott Mathers from the Rainwater Harvest Systems. Austin (one of SAR’s directors and Resilience alum) and Nurit (our stakeholder) gave us the pleasure of joining in. We had a lot of questions and Jeff and Scott had the experience to answer them. Whether the questions were about the best positioning and shaping of the cistern, how to manage overflow, which material for the cistern would be most cost effective and flexible, or which type of irrigation would be the most practical, they knew it all. The exposure to such a wealth of firsthand information was greight; however, it was also slightly terrifying. We learned that the type of filter (hydrodynamic separator) we would need to properly treat the water runoff of a parking lot would cost about fifteen – twenty thousand dollars. This certainly presents a challenge and adds pressure to secure funding of considerable proportions. Oh yeah, that reminds me: TGIF applications are right around the corner!  I wish we had known about the filter situation sooner, but better leight than never. 

Don’t fret though. We here at SAR possess a common treight, one of determination. We will not buckle under the surmounting wEight of pressure that is life at UCLA… and the potentiality of fifty thousand gallons or so of water capture cisterns. We got this.

Stay tuned and stay environmental ya’ll!