Just Keep Swimming (…and Emailing)

By Cayla Whiteside

Last week was a busy week for the Resilience Team, measuring the Boelter Space, constructing CAD documents, meeting with Tom Lukas, seeing Parking Structure 9, and conversing with our stakeholder Nurit. This week, we confirmed our decision as a team that Parking Structure 9 will be the site for our proposal; it is a larger space, easier to get approved, has water reuse potential, and would improve the area aesthetically. We are also super excited to work with Tom, who seems as enthusiastic about this project as we are!

This week has been a lot more low key for our team. It mostly involved a large number of emails… We have needed to contact various personnel in regards to logistics for the project. Manali reached out to the head gardener to discuss the reuse opportunities for the captured water, Kat reached out to the UCLA Environmental Health and Safety department to determine what treatments and water quality standards our system should meet, and Cayla and Ricardo reached out to Tom and his team to work on the CAD drawings and plumbing drawings to draft up an initial proposal document. Lily also conducted research into the possible tank options and initial costs. In another email, we have reached out to a rainwater harvesting company to meet with them and discuss our plans; we are hoping they could give us advice and feedback regarding our project and give possible options for complete systems. We are hoping to hear back from everyone soon so that we can start holding meetings, creating plans, and conducting a budget. We also plan to hold an engineering study of the area within the next few weeks.

We are all super excited about our project and these past two weeks has seen a lot of movement and progress. We hope to keep things moving forward as quickly as possible!