Bobbi Fuller knew little about saving water before she joined the Los Angeles Infrastructure Academy last September.
"Seriously, if you asked me a year ago what I thought about water conservation, I really wouldn't have had anything to say," said the 17-year-old junior at Animo Jackie Robinson High School, a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) charter campus in South Los Angeles. "But now I understand that we live in a desert, and we have to take care of our resources ... my eyes have really been opened to a lot of issues that I never really cared about before."
Keith Session, a 20-year-old student at the Los Angeles Trade-Technical College campus Downtown, was a senior at San Pedro High School when he learned about the academy, which launched in August 2007 with a goal of grooming LAUSD students for careers with public utility companies and others that will help maintain the city's infrastructure.
Among the after-school and weekend academy classes that more than 150 other LAUSD students have attended is one course that explores the ways to best conserve water in the county. Early next month Fuller and Session, along with 36 other students, are expected to take the next step in the coursework when they begin working on a four-month program to review and audit water use of at least 120 LAUSD middle and high schools.
The student auditors will check the schools selected for leaky fixtures and pipes in bathrooms, gymnasiums, cafeterias and classroom laboratories, Session said. Fixtures found to be obsolete will be identified, labeled and a more suitable replacement will be recommended.
School lawn sprinklers and irrigation systems will be inspected as part of the audit, and a calculation of how much water each school uses during the year will be made by reading water meters, Session said.
"We want to break this down and find a way to use our water better," he said. "Our schools are getting older. We need to do our best to make sure that our water is being used in the best way possible."
The audit will provide the school district with important data, said Marcus Castain, the academy's chief executive officer. The district asked for an audit of all its schools after a Roosevelt High School experiment last October showed that the school was using eight times the water necessary for operations, according to Castain.
"They asked us, 'How many can you do?' " Castain said. "Can you do all the schools? They really want a baseline of information, not just a school here, or a school there."
Additional schools, including elementary schools, will be inspected if time allows, he said.
The work will take place in two phases, from early May to late June. One team of up to six students who have completed the school year will audit 20 schools. Four teams will conduct the second phase of the audits — about 100 — from July to August.
The students will be supervised by an academy staff member. Each audit is expected to take a half a day to complete. Schools with the largest number of students — and those that have in the past had the largest recorded consumption of water — are expected to be studied.
Because the students have learned the latest water conservation techniques from civil engineers and other experts in the field, Castain expects the study to be comprehensive and rigorous.
An emphasis has been put on water conservation with green technology in mind, he said. As part of their education about water issues, students have taken field trips to water treatment facilities and reservoirs and studied how water is delivered to Los Angeles and distributed throughout the city. It will be an opportunity for the students to use many of the skills they have learned. The audit will be the first long-term project that the students have undertaken, he said.
"Most people take water for granted. You turn on the tap and water comes out," said Castain. "But I think in the years to come people are going to become more conscious about how we use our water. Water conservation is a huge green job."
The need to conserve water becomes will become even more apparent as California is allowed to take less water from traditional sources, such as the Colorado River and the Central Sierra Mountains, he said.
"One thing that most people don't know is that just moving water around is actually the single largest use of energy in the state," Castain said.
The goal of the academy is to direct students toward jobs that will inevitably need to be filled when a pending wave of retirements from the city-owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) begins in the next few years. According to officials of the DWP, which has helped fund the audit, 50% of its workers will retire within the next 10 years.
The Infrastructure Academy "is an attempt to build a pipeline for diverse and well-qualified young people to enter the civil infrastructure field and place them into good-paying careers" Castain said. "We're concerned that there is a lack of young people ready to fill these positions."
High school student Fuller said that she has gained confidence in her ability to carry out the work needed to handle the audit and complete other tasks vital to keeping the city's infrastructure well maintained. She now can hammer a nail without bending it, she said, and can even build an entire wall.
"I was someone you would never see pick up a power tool," Fuller said. "I never really thought that a woman could be a construction worker. But now I realize that you just have to have a flair for it."
Despite the advantage academy students have, the weakened economy has prevented students, so far, from finding jobs. Prospects right now may be bleak, said Castain, but he is confident that jobs will open up later. For right now, there are plenty of internships available to students.
The scarcity of jobs in the future hasn't deterred Session, who sees the time spent in the academy as an investment in his future. The classroom training he gets at Trade-Tech can only go so far, he said. He wants the hands-on experience of the audit to help him build on what he has learned in class.
"The fact that we were getting hands-on training, that was something that interested me when I found out about the program," said Session, who hopes some day to land a job with the LADWP. "It gave all the things that I needed. It's giving me the exposure I needed about water conservation."
Related info:
* Infrastructure Academy
* bewaterwise.com — website set up by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Family of Southern California Water Agencies to promote water conservation
* News website of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power
Andre Briscoe is a writer for the L.A. Watts Times.
Photo of Los Angeles Aqueduct from Wikipedia; photo of Infrastructure Academy students courtesy of the Infrastructure Academy
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