Evaluating the Equity and Efficacy of Los Angeles County’s Stormwater Capture Projects

Urban watersheds face ongoing pollution challenges, especially from urban runoff. Heal the Bay is a Los Angeles-based organization that has been monitoring water quality at local beaches for decades, and expanded their efforts to Los Angeles (LA) County rivers in the last ten years. LA County and local organizations have implemented stormwater capture projects, which are thought to help mitigate the runoff pollution that enters local waterways during storms. Our group’s objectives are to analyze the last ten years of water quality data from Heal the Bay’s monitoring programs to investigate the water quality in areas where stormwater capture projects have been implemented. Our findings will be used to generate recommendations for where future stormwater capture projects may be the most impactful, with a lens of environmental health equity. Our approach to accomplishing these objectives will include 1) Creating a cloud-based database of Heal The Bay’s water quality monitoring data and the location of stormwater capture projects 2) Create a Shiny app to visualize project locations and trends in water quality. These products will support Heal The Bay’s mission to make coastal waters and watersheds in Greater Los Angeles safe, healthy, and clean.