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L.A. Wildfires: Rebuilding for a Hotter, Drier Future
00:32:54
Sammy is joined by Kelly Sanders, an engineering professor at USC and former White House advisor on energy policy. They talk about what the fires mean for the future of Los Angeles, and how the city might adapt as the planet heats up and the climate crisis worsens.
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- [00:01]
Kelly Sanders
This is an LA Times Studios podcast.
- [00:09]
Sami Roth
Los Angeles is my home. I grew up right here. Going to Dodgers games, sitting in Traffic on the 405, hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, reading the LA Times. When I started writing about climate change, I knew this place was vulnerable. I knew about sea level rise and heat waves and droughts. I knew about wildfires. I knew they were all getting worse. Still, the climate crisis somehow felt distant. Deep down, it felt like something that was happening somewhere else to someone else. This month, it doesn't feel so distant anymore.
- [00:46]
Kelly Sanders
This morning we woke up to a dark cloud over all of Los Angeles.
- [00:54]
Sami Roth
We've got fires throughout the entire county. These fires are stretching the capacity of.
- [01:00]
Kelly Sanders
Emergency services to their maximum limits.
- [01:03]
Sami Roth
Fire literally jumping roads, taking out structures.
- [01:07]
Kelly Sanders
If you're told to evacuate, then get the hell out.
- [01:10]
Sami Roth
You are not going to outrun these fires.
- [01:13]
Kelly Sanders
It is difficult to process the immensity of the destruction and loss.
- [01:21]
Sami Roth
As of this recording, More than 40,000 acres have burned in half a dozen wildfires across LA County. More than 12,000 homes and other buildings have been destroyed. At least 25 people are dead. Early estimates put the damages and economic losses at more than $50 billion. Climate change didn't ignite the fires, but scientists say there's no question it's helped make them so devastating. My name is Sami Roth and I'm the climate columnist for the Los Angeles Times. I've been reporting on climate change for 10 years with a focus on clean energy solutions. We'll be talking about solutions today, but before we do, it's important to understand how exactly climate change is making these fires worse. Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward. The last few months we've had basically zero rain in Southern California, but the two winters before this one were wet. That means the mountains and hillsides still have a lot of grass and brush. Ideal kindling for wildfires. Especially now that it's all dried out. California has always experienced these wet, dry cycles. But global warming is making this weather whiplash more intense. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are trapping more heat. This allows the atmosphere to absorb and release more water. As a result, floods and droughts are becoming more extreme. The longer we keep burning coal, oil and natural gas, the worse it is going to get. The good thing is we're making progress on clean energy. In 2023, California got almost 60% of its electricity from solar, wind, nuclear, hydropower and other low carbon sources. About 25% of new passenger cars being sold in California these days are fully electric or plug in hybrids. The thing is, we have to move faster. And it's not going to be easy. Fossil fuels are incredibly dangerous. But that doesn't mean clean energy is perfect. If companies build big solar or wind farms in the wrong spots, those projects can destroy wildlife habitat. And if we tried to shut down every fossil fueled power plant and oil refinery tomorrow, modern life would grind to a halt. We've got to be careful. We've got to move urgently, but also deliberately. And just as importantly, we have to come to grips with the fact that climate change is here no matter how fast we move on. Clean Energy 2024 was the hottest year on record. Again, wildfires like LA's experiencing, experiencing right now, they're not once in a generation anymore. Same thing with storms like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. We need to start changing the way we live or we're going to be in even bigger trouble. That means thinking about how we rebuild and how we keep the lights on and how we interact with the natural world in Southern California and everywhere else. Does it make sense to keep putting homes in places that are more and more likely to burn? How much are we willing to spend to bury electric lines to make sure they don't spark fires? If that's going to cost billions of dollars and lead to higher electric bills, how do we make sure we have enough water not just for humans, but also for plants and fish and other wildlife? And what happens to our cities and our rural communities and our natural world if we can't make any of it work? These are hard questions and on this podcast we're going to ask them. Every week on Boiling Point, I'll have a different guest, an expert to guide us through the climate and energy and environmental challenges facing California and the American West. Thank you for joining us this week. Our guest is Kelly Sanders. She's a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. She just finished a year long stint advising the Biden White House on clean energy policy. I sat down with Kelly at her office on the USC campus. The fires were raging. We had a lot to talk about. Kelly Sanders, welcome to the Boiling Point podcast.
- [06:05]
Kelly Sanders
Thank you for having me.
- [06:07]
Sami Roth
So, Kelly, let's start here. You told me that you live in Santa Monica, right? Not too far from one of the evacuation zones.
- [06:13]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah. So a little backstory on this is I just moved back from Washington D.C. about a week ago and I came.
- [06:19]
Sami Roth
Well, right as it was getting started.
- [06:20]
Kelly Sanders
Right as it was getting started. So I came into an actual fire zone. So my voice is a Little hoarse and a little raspy. And that's because I've been breathing the particulates for a week. So I came back and, yeah, I've kind of been on that evacuation border for the past few days. I actually left one night. Slept here in this office that you sit.
- [06:42]
Sami Roth
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that sounds scary. I mean, a lot of people have these stories right now, but that definitely sounds terrifying. I hope everything is okay with your home and whatnot.
- [06:51]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, everything is fine. And I'm certainly in a much better position than a lot of people across the basin.
- [06:56]
Sami Roth
Okay. Yeah. I mean, the particulates in the area that you referenced, I mean, even for folks who are not in the fire zones, that's something that I think we've all been experiencing to a certain extent. I mean, the other night my throat started to get hoarse, and I was thinking at first, oh, God, do I have Covid? And I thought, no, I'm probably just breathing in the smoke like everyone else. It's pretty bad out there.
- [07:14]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah. And one of the ironies is I chose to live in Santa Monica because the air quality tends to be better there. And we've just been kind of sitting in a smoke plume from the Palisades for the last week. So it's been, you know, it's been definitely living a little piece of history, that's for sure.
- [07:30]
Sami Roth
A lot of the discussion over the last week since these fires started to ignite has been, what could have been done to prevent this? People are talking about, could we have done more to clear brush in the mountains? What could we have done to get better water pressure in the fire hydrants? Are there reservoirs that could have been filled that weren't filled? Is the fire department budget not high enough? Or alternately, is this just what climate change looks like? Is this just what the future is going to look like, only it's going to get worse and worse? I guess as a sort of framing for our whole discussion here, this is a dire sounding question, so I apologize. Is this inevitable now? Is this just what we're stuck with? Weeks like this one again and again, but maybe even worse?
- [08:13]
Kelly Sanders
Well, you're talking to an academic, so I guess I'll preface this with the answer as nuanced as it always is. And I think this is a tough one. You know, have the scientists been predicting that something like this can happen in the regions where it happened? The answer is yes. And, you know, we got this selection of variables that came together that brought these fire episodes upon us. California has always been fire prone so that hasn't changed. But what has changed is the dry is getting drier. So we're sitting here in January and we really haven't gotten a significant rain event this year. That's not really normal like we're supposed to. It's not unprecedented, but we're pretty dry. If you recall, a year ago or so, we had the atmospheric rivers, and we have a lot of fuel that was created from that, a lot of growth, a lot of foliage that can burn. So the dries are getting drier, the wets are getting wetter, and the heat exacerbates all of that.
- [09:15]
Sami Roth
Everything dries out easier to burn.
- [09:17]
Kelly Sanders
Exactly. And then the thing that we're kind of responsible for is we keep building farther and farther out into what the scientists call the wildlife urban interface. So you need two things for a wildfire. You need stuff to burn, and then you need something to ignite it. And as humans go into this wildlife urban interface, you know, they have cars, they have fire, they have all kinds of things. Power lines that can create these sparks and create these fires. So back to your question. Is this our new reality? I think every decision that we make from here on has to be proactive. How do we build in a way that can mitigate the chance that this happens again or is resilient to the fires that might happen?
- [10:06]
Sami Roth
Before we talk about that, I mean, longer term, if we want to get out of this horrifying cycle, we do need to deal with climate change, right? I mean, we need to stop these emissions from fossil fuels that are just going to keep making this worse.
- [10:19]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we need to think about wildfire mitigation, and we also have to think about climate change mitigation. And that's just a game of how do you. You reduce emissions as fast as possible.
- [10:31]
Sami Roth
So when we think about responding to these fires, when we think about what kind of place is LA going to be going forward, I mean, you talked about we've built out into these places that were already prone to burning even before climate change, into these mountains, into these hillsides, into these ravines. Maybe. Let's start here. Does it make sense to keep doing that? I mean, it's kind of a hard conversation to have because of course you don't want to say to someone, no, you can't go back and put your home back there because their home just burned down. That's kind of a terrible thing to say, but where do you start that conversation? How do you think about that issue?
- [11:03]
Kelly Sanders
So, like you prefaced, this is A really hard conversation to have. And I think we need to be empathetic to. There's a science part of this conversation, but then there's also a human part of this conversation. And a lot of people, a lot of the homes that were in these regions were there for multiple generations. And I don't think the right response is you can't build anything anywhere. I mean, one of the other, unfortunately, critical parts of California's public policy conversation is also a housing shortage. So, you know, we have multiple priorities that we need to balance. And so I think we need to think about how we build back. So if we build a house in a fire zone, how do you build it to the highest standard in terms of fire mitigation? How do you build houses in proximity to each other that they don't create the conditions that they burn faster? There's been some research in the peer reviewed literature to geek out for a second, and they've looked at how we rebuild after these wildfires hit across dozens of California fires. And what we find is not much changes. Not much changes in terms of where we build and not much changes in terms of how we build. So the last time we revised the building codes, it did get a little bit better. So the houses that abide by better building codes tend to burn less than houses that were built earlier. So that's good news. We know it works. And so as we rebuild, we really have to think about how do you incentivize the builders to build back better, to use an overblown fate?
- [12:54]
Sami Roth
I remember build back better. Yeah, all of that makes perfect sense in theory and sounds like who would object to that if that was explained to them. But it gets so hard because after your community burns down, it's like all anyone wants to hear, understandably, is how do I build back as fast as possible? Give me support to do that. It's like, who wants to get bogged down in a conversation about building codes and better regulations and resilience? Right. I mean, I assume that's why it's hard.
- [13:19]
Kelly Sanders
That's why it's hard. And the other thing that happens is you lose the institutional knowledge. A lot of people have been traumatized by this event. They might move, other people might come in that didn't live through this. And so I think that's where public policy has to come in. You have to give the incentive structure where why would you do anything else than do these things?
- [13:42]
Sami Roth
So you're saying you need politicians to be actually making smart public policy and not just wasting their Time responding to whatever loud critics are in the room, spreading misinformation and not just getting bogged down with that.
- [13:53]
Kelly Sanders
I think so. And I think, and this is really, really hard to do, is you have to create a system where you're not just gravitating towards the least cost solution. And this is kind of twofold. Like, after a community is decimated, what else do you want to do than to rebuild really fast? Like, if you have a city budget, you need some sort of tax revenue to come into the city. So that creates this kind of perverse incentive to just build back as fast and as cheap as possible. And we really can't do that this time. We really have to see this as an opportunity. And this is with any natural disaster, anytime a fire or a flood or a hurricane comes through, you should use that opportunity to say, okay, well, what's the highest standard? What have we learned in the decades since we last built this thing and start to implement those lessons learned.
- [14:51]
Sami Roth
So when we think about building homes back in a more resilient way after fires, just at a really high level, how does that work? What types of materials are we talking about? What types of steps can people take to do that?
- [15:01]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, so I think that we could create public policy that incentivize builders in particular to use materials that are less prone to burn. So, for example, you could use slate and types of concrete that aren't going to catch fire, like a wooden house would, for example, just to give something easy.
- [15:19]
Sami Roth
But harden Altadena and Pasadena with all those nice craftsman homes that are made of wood.
- [15:23]
Kelly Sanders
Right. Unfortunately. But as we replace those, those are gonna be some of the hard decisions that we need to make, is how do we build back with materials that aren't going to catch fire. And along with that, we also have to think about the boundaries and landscape of our homes. So there's some plants, for example, like succulents, that tend to be a little bit more fire resistant. Fences could be metal rather than wood. Sprinkler systems can be installed to be turned on when these fires approach houses. So there's some of these smaller decisions that these home builders can make and that the people that are rebuilding can make to make these types of disasters a little less prone in the future.
- [16:10]
Sami Roth
One thing that's been interesting, where there's been a lot of focus, is how do we have enough water to put out these fires and moving water around the city. We talked earlier briefly about the fire hydrants and not having enough pressure in the hydrants and the Explanation from the city for that from LA Department of Water and Power was just that the city water system was not designed to run for 15 hours at a time pushing this much water up the hills in Pacific Palisades to put out that fire. Which makes a lot of sense, I guess. I'm just, just curious for you to weigh in on that. If you have any thoughts on how from just a moving water around perspective, do we deal with this new fire reality that we have.
- [16:49]
Kelly Sanders
Well, the history of LA is we decided to build a city here, but we really have no natural water resources if you look around. So within LADWP, nearly 90% of all of our water is imported from very distant places. So that creates a really challenging water management situation. And I don't think it's realistic to build out the water system that could have kept all of that system pressurized to fight however many catastrophic fires we had going at the same time. Like at some point you have to do a cost benefit analysis and say, how much can the taxpayers absorb to build out that system? Now I will say, you know that statistic that I just gave you? We import nearly 90% of all of our water into the city. That can get a lot better. Like a lot of our water flows out to the ocean. In the future, that should be unacceptable.
- [17:44]
Sami Roth
There's a lot of investment in recycling happening right now.
- [17:46]
Kelly Sanders
Exactly. And so the city is trying to make it such that we do recycle 100% of our wastewater that would otherwise go to the city. So those are really where the opportunity is. If the water hits the basin, we should capture it, we should clean it, and we should reuse it, and we should figure out how we become more resilient to these, these issues. There are certainly ways that we could get better and there will probably be a report written and lessons learned. But water is a physical resource, and again, to fight the type of fire that we had, it probably isn't realistic to build out that type of system in a city that just doesn't have the water.
- [18:30]
Sami Roth
That's a hard thing for people to accept. I bet the idea that we might now have to live in this reality where we actually can't solve all of these problems and we have to live in maybe a different way. I don't know. You've lived in Los Angeles a decent amount of time now, and do you think people can wrap their heads around that? How do we start doing it?
- [18:50]
Kelly Sanders
I think there are hard trade offs here. I mean, the Phoenix landscape does not look like the Los Angeles landscape. We don't have the lush green grasses there. We don't have some of the beautiful flower gardens and arrangements. Our physical landscape here doesn't necessarily reflect our climate. And that's a strategic decision that we're making. If we wanted this, you know, water system built out, optimized for wildfires when they come every couple years, we could build that system. But it would come at the expense of all of these other things that kind of create the fabric of Los Angeles. So everything is a decision. You can't have everything.
- [19:35]
Sami Roth
Well, let's get specific. You called out grass lawns. I think people are probably familiar with that one, at least in theory. What else are you thinking about? What other changes in terms of the way the city looks, in terms of housing, in terms of maybe transportation, what else come to your mind as sort of important targets or areas to think about?
- [19:53]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, so I think in terms of the water landscape of Los Angeles, about 50% of our water is used outdoors. And so I think that in terms of the opportunities, that's really where the lower, and I say lower because we've already done a lot of it. Hanging fruit is indoor. We've already done a lot of it. We've already like switched out the toilets and the shower heads, et cetera. We're not going to save the water system by turning off the water when you're brushing your teeth at this point. It's like the big buckets of water tend to be outside.
- [20:23]
Sami Roth
So let's pick off some of the higher hanging fruit. I mean, we're not going to solve climate change with the lower hanging fruit. What's up the scale here?
- [20:30]
Kelly Sanders
It's outdoor water use. So should we be irrigating golf courses? Maybe we should if it's recycled water. But at some point I hope that that recycled water goes to higher and higher uses such that maybe the golf courses don't have priority for that water.
- [20:49]
Sami Roth
I can live with that. Can you?
- [20:51]
Kelly Sanders
But I think the point with water is you have to create a hierarchy of the things that we need water for. Drinking. Absolutely. Showering? Absolutely. So a lot of our indoor uses we absolutely need to keep. And then I think it comes to what are the outdoor uses that we need? What are the industries that we want to have here in the basin where water is scarce? And do we think that those are acceptable uses of water?
- [21:23]
Sami Roth
So we've talked about water and I want to get to energy and what the fires mean for our energy future too. But let's use housing for a minute here as a segue. Because I think they connect nicely. We've talked about housing sprawl going out into this, the wildland urban interface, as you talked about. Would we be better served as we adapt to this hotter, drier, more fiery climate future to have some denser housing and less sprawling out into the mountains and the areas with all the foliage and more in the urban landscape, would that be helpful?
- [21:56]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, I think that's the name of the game here in Los Angeles is we need high efficient density housing. So we need to build higher, we need to build more dense and we need to make sure the stuff that we build is really, really energy efficient.
- [22:11]
Sami Roth
And I'm sure the homeowners associations and the wealthy single family homeowners will love that. Right. They'll get on board right away.
- [22:17]
Kelly Sanders
Absolutely. I hear that they're big fans of those types of policies.
- [22:21]
Sami Roth
Yes. And also, but seriously now moving away from my farcical tone. Good. From a climate perspective. Right. Because fewer emissions to drive around, easier to take public transit. I mean, it serves a lot of benefits.
- [22:32]
Kelly Sanders
There's a lot of benefits here. And if we could make a segue to the energy part of the problem when it comes to thinking about what does a zero carbon energy system look like, there's kind of two camps. So one is you have to build really long high voltage power lines very, very far distances to connect renewable energy projects to cities.
- [22:55]
Sami Roth
Bring the energy from the big solar farms, wind farms out in the desert in the hinterlands to Los Angeles, etc.
- [23:00]
Kelly Sanders
Yes, just move it all hundreds of miles, bring it to Los Angeles, and it doesn't matter where the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. The other camp says you can do it all locally. You know, build solar on the homes, build micro wind turbines in the cities, use a lot of energy storage, et cetera. I think the answer for Los Angeles is probably in the middle of those two things. But I think that we have to be honest with ourselves that building big transmission lines through really, really high risk fire areas is becoming a problem.
- [23:35]
Sami Roth
Yeah. So just to add some context before we continue this energy talk, I mean, it's not yet clear what the cause was of any of the fires that are burning right now, but there have been fires in the past in Southern California, some of biggest and most destructive that were ignited by power lines, by big high voltage transmission lines like you're describing. And with the Eaton fire in the Altadena and Pasadena area, there is investigation ongoing right now as of this recording into whether a Southern California Edison electrical tower may have been the ignition point for that fire. Edison says it doesn't believe that was the case, but fire agencies are investigating that. So that's the context for this conversation. I mean, all of the studies that I've seen say that in order to get to 100% clean energy, to get fossil fuels off the power grid, we are going to need a combination of large scale renewable energy, big solar and wind farms and rooftop solar, smaller scale stuff, microgrids. I mean, we do probably ultimately need some combination of both, right?
- [24:36]
Kelly Sanders
Absolutely. And to be clear, I'm not anti transmission. I think we need strategic high transmission lines that go through, you know, wildlife areas, for example.
- [24:46]
Sami Roth
But the more we can do within the city, the more efficient we can be, the less we can rely on those potentially risky high voltage lines, the better.
- [24:55]
Kelly Sanders
Right. And we should be thoughtful about where the transmission lines go, for one. And then we need to use a lot of technology on those transmission lines that we do build. So we need sensors that tell us the real time weather conditions. We need sensors that show us how much power is flowing through those lines and how power might be diverted if there's a risk that emerges. You know, there's ways that you can cover lines, you can, in the worst case scenario, you can underground lines. But that's a really expensive solution. And I don't think that we have the resources to underground all of the transmission lines.
- [25:30]
Sami Roth
You know, it's been interesting after like the campfire that destroyed paradise and killed 85 people back in 2018 and other fires that handful of years, there was a lot of discussion about undergrounding lines and that being a big solution to stop igniting wildfires. But especially the last few years as electric rates have been getting really out of control, especially for Pacific Gas and Electric and San Diego Gas and Electric, but also for Southern California Edison. And that's been driven in part by paying for those undergrounding projects and other wildfire mitigation efforts, I feel like the conversation has shifted a little bit in the opposite direction of oh, maybe we're spending too much money burying power lines. Maybe we should be focused on less expensive ways to reduce wildfire risk. And so I'm just curious now what's actually going to happen after these fires in la? I wonder if the conversation is going to shift backwards. No, spend as much money as possible, do everything you can to stop wildfires, no matter how much it costs. But I think you're sort of raising a pretty valid point here of no, we still have to be careful and balance a lot of different objectives. You have to think about electric rates. You have to think about fire risk. You have to think about the fact that if electric rates go up, people aren't going to want to adopt electric cars, which is an important climate solution to reduce emissions and reduce the risk of fires. There's a lot of balls in the air all at the same time.
- [26:47]
Kelly Sanders
Yeah, well, that's. I mean, that's this balancing act that we keep coming down to. If you. If electricity rates go up too high, people aren't going to electrify, or we're not going to have money to invest in other parts of the system to decarbonize. And then climate change gets worse and this whole issue gets worse. So we have to make hard decisions. And I don't think that underground everything, everywhere is going to be a viable solution. We just don't have unlimited resources. And that's why, yes, we're going to have to build transmission lines, but we have a lot of technology, we have a lot of mitigation resources for those lines, so we can mitigate the risk of fires. And if you do have to build a transmission line through a really, really high risk area underground, it. But those need to be strategic decisions. It's not just like a blanket policy because we just don't have the money for it.
- [27:43]
Sami Roth
And one other thing that I want to make sure doesn't get lost here is that even after we hopefully move on from these fires and everything's fully contained, the risk of mudslides is going to remain. Right. Because after the landscapes have been charred and those burn scars are there, I mean, that creates the risk that the next time one of those big floods hit, that all of that soil that's been uprooted and is no longer held firmly in place. I mean, that stuff can come down pretty hard on communities in a flood. That's what happened in Montecito in 2018. Right. People can die in those things.
- [28:15]
Kelly Sanders
Absolutely. So you've described it beautifully. But unfortunately, these fires happen on the hills. And when the rains finally come, if the rains finally come, there's nothing for the water to grab onto or to infiltrate into. And so then we're gonna the mudslides, which can create its own type of damages.
- [28:37]
Sami Roth
I feel like there's a fatigue here where it's just like one thing after another after another. Does that make it easier or more difficult to talk about climate change and to talk about these weather extremes, like the fact that they're always happening? Because I can never quite put my finger on it. Like, do people get Tired of it or is it easier when it's always happening?
- [28:53]
Kelly Sanders
I think there's a certain amount of exhaustion that comes with it. Because if it's not the fires you're talking about, the floods, there's always something to worry about. And I think as humans, we kind of. One, we adapt very quickly, so we normalize things very quickly. But we're not good at being on the edge of our seat for a really, really long time. Even the national news media, they were on this fire for the first 24 to 36 hours, and then the coverage kind of trails off. Yet the people in Los Angeles are still living this. They're still evacuated. The fires are still raging on. So I think it's part of that cycle. There's always something, the next thing to worry about, but we get exhausted, and then we don't proactively plan for it.
- [29:40]
Sami Roth
Do you think we can really do it? I mean, this future that you and I are discussing here in great detail, where Los Angeles is recycling most of its water, and we've shut down most of these gas plants and are getting most of our electricity from rooftop solar panels and solar from strategically placed transmission lines to go out to the big solar farms, and where we've stopped building homes out at into the mountains, and it's a much denser city, and where we're taking public transit and where fires have unfortunately probably still gotten worse because of climate change, but not that much worse because we've stopped emitting quite so much. I mean, it's pretty amazing to think about, but we're just kind of sitting here thinking about it. It's gonna require big political changes and social changes and economic changes. Can we really do it?
- [30:27]
Kelly Sanders
You know, energy and water and climate and wildfires. I like to connect the dots between all of these systems. And I think moving forward, we can't afford to look at every single problem in a single box. So we really have to think about how do you create a city that can be resilient to wildfires at the same time that you're decarbonizing that system? Like, if you look at the Venn diagram of resilience and you look at the Venn diagram of climate mitigation, where do you get multiple winds? And I think housing is a multiple wind type of thing. You build really dense and really high efficiency in the middle of the city. You get some wildfire winds there, you get some energy winds there. It's also easier to get water to the middle of the city than it is.
- [31:19]
Sami Roth
It has low elevation so you don't have to push it uphill.
- [31:22]
Kelly Sanders
Right.
- [31:22]
Sami Roth
And that saves energy too. So you're not burning as much gas.
- [31:25]
Kelly Sanders
Pushing it up the hill. And in terms of water recycling, it's easier to keep it in the basin. So we have to start looking for those solutions where you get low hanging fruit on multiple fronts.
- [31:39]
Sami Roth
Kelly, thank you very much for being with us on the inaugural Boiling Point podcast.
- [31:44]
Kelly Sanders
Thanks Sammy.
- [31:48]
Sami Roth
We'll be back with new episodes of Boiling Point every Thursday. Leave us a review and let us know what you think. And if you live in LA county, stay safe. Thank you for listening to Boiling Point. I'm your host, Sammy Roth. My producers are Mary Knauff and Jonathan Shiflett. Sound design and original music by Jonathan Shiflett. Elijah Wolfson is our editor. Denise Callahan is our studio manager. Ben Church is our Production manager. Nick Norton is our engineer. Special thanks to LA Times Studio President Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argentieri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Boiling Point is executive produced by Darius Derekshon and created by me, Sammy Roth.