Corona Heights Park is a scrubby brown field beneath a rocky bluff, nestled right next to the Randall Museum. The field, which abuts a pair of tennis courts and a community garden, is used almost exclusively by dog walkers. In the past year it's hosted no softball games or picnics; children don't play tag there, people don't lie in the grass.
But until recently, the staff at the city's Recreation & Park Department watered Corona Heights field for 30 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday morning, with seven sprinklers blasting simultaneously. That's about 12 gallons of water per minute, or 2,520 gallons per watering, or 5,000 gallons per week, according to one neighbor's estimate — all pumped from fresh water pipes linking to the pristine Hetch Hetchy reservoir. (In August Rec & Parks cut back to once a week, or 1,260 gallons, a spokeswoman says.)
Perhaps these 7-sprinkler showers seem excessive, but they're the only way to keep Corona Heights from turning into a dirt pit, the Rec & Park staff says.
In fact, Corona Heights is emblematic of San Francisco's nagging water quandary. Natural resource wonks have long pushed for eco-friendly irrigation systems that use ground water from wells, or recycled water from drain systems, to nourish the city's many open greens. And San Francisco has long wanted to implement them, but high costs and heavy construction processes have gotten in the way.
That's understandable, says Cal Poly geography professor Terence Young, indicating that conservation gets a lot dicier once you start trading capital for a resource. When the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission wanted to install a new recycled water system at Harding Park golf links, for example, it had to build a new underground storage tank, erect a pump station at Lake Merced, and relay thousands of feet of pipeline along Lake Merced Boulevard. The state gave final approval for the project in 2012 after a five-year environmental review and construction — which is a short timeline, by public utility standards.
The bigger elephant in the room, Young says, is that San Francisco doesn't have a long-term plan for a drought that could persist for the next 30 years. A dry climate isn't the new normal for San Francisco — it's the old normal. This city was built on a Mediterranean-style desert; the unusually lush rains of the last century were just an aberration.
The question, then, is whether Rec & Park is gearing up to reduce water consumption across the board by 2025. And the best way to do that, Young says, is to replace much of the current greenery with native species — a more "natural" San Francisco would consist of sand dunes and shrubs, instead of green lawns and juniper trees.
In its current, well-saturated state, Corona Heights symbolizes prodigal city practices. Left out to dry, it might presage a sandier, more natural future.
Showing 1-2 of 2
Comments are closed.
