UCLA is up to its waist in problems after students were up their ankles in dirty water last week.
Last week, a water main burst on Sunset Boulevard, wasting about 20 million gallons of water and flooding parts of campus during one of California’s most severe droughts in recent memory. As the damage done to the ultra-expensive revamped edition of Pauley Pavilion and stranded cars monopolizes most of the headlines, discussion about water conservation seems to have been left by the wayside.
The aftermath of the flood is the perfect time to make environmental protection initiatives more public. With the eyes of the Los Angeles community on our campus, making a point to get more people involved in water conservation efforts would not only benefit UCLA, but the broader community as it faces extreme water shortages.
Individual methods to save water aren’t difficult to come by. Nearly everyone has been told to take shorter showers at some point. But as an institution, UCLA should work harder to engage students with water conservation and other environmental issues considering the drought and especially in the wake of the flood.
To be sure, water conservation has been a major concern for the university over recent years. Statistics compiled by the UCLA Sustainability Office show that annual water consumption on campus has been reduced steadily since 2001. The Water Action Plan, published in December 2013, outlines a plan for the university to reduce water consumption by 183,390,000 gallons per year.
However, the plan mentions next to nothing about what students can do to impact water usage. Including a substantial section about simple and direct ways that students can create positive change, both individually and collaboratively, can’t hurt.
UCLA needs to change the campus culture around environmental issues, and it’ll take more than an email update from the Chancellor every now and then to do that. Something as simple as promoting environmental campus organizations like E3 could increase involvement, as could publicizing the sustainability work that the Undergraduate Students Association Council Facilities Commission does on campus. When more students see that there are programs in place to tackle issues they care about, involvement will surely increase.
Considering all the improvements that the school can make to recover, it’s still up to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to take real responsibility for saving water by ensuring a disaster this wasteful does not happen again. One of the pipes that burst on Tuesday was nearly 100 years old. When piping isn’t renovated over long stretches of time, large-scale damage should be expected.
While the LADWP should clearly shoulder responsibility for the accident and make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, members of the Los Angeles and UCLA community also have their own part to play.
We should be talking less about property damage and more about the overarching issue: water conservation. For now, it’s the most effective way to deal with a situation that was out of our hands.