In 2010, it was still a crime to stick your toe in the L.A. Now we are on the way to a newly vibrant waterway
In the late 1930s, in response to a pair of deadly floods, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the unruly Los Angeles River, which had, over millenniums, shifted its course innumerable times on its way to the sea.
Taming L.A.'s river was the Army Corps' first major flood control project, and its mission was to get the water to the ocean as fast as possible. The idea that it might make sense, in a city that gets less than 15 inches of rain a year on average, to conserve some of those hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater seems to have never occurred to the corps
major portion of Los Angeles City Hall's skyscraper transformation of Hollywood — a dream vilified as a nightmare by critics who fought to stop multiple high-rise towers approved by the pro-density City Council — could instead be derailed by Mother Nature.
Los Angeles sits on about 100 quake faults, active and inactive. Only a couple dozen, however, are capable of rupturing the surface. Geologists believe that people in buildings atop those faults face catastrophic death and disaster.
Such faults can "break the foundations and crack the building," State Geologist John Parrish says. Geologists believe buildings could crack in half.
City planners are feverishly granting approval to big projects directly above and near the active fault, even ignoring shouts fro
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