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Whether you live in a rural area or a city, the built environment all around us includes many impermeable structures which function to move water away from roads, homes, and buildings. Roads are often center-crowned to prevent water from pooling on the roadway and function to direct the run-off towards ditches or culverts on the side of the road. In arid Arizona, we often can see the result of this process in the form of wildflowers and other plants growing more densely right by the roadsides than in the rest of the landscape. They get more water, thanks to the roadway!

 

This lesson has do with structure and function. Large areas with impermeable surfaces create a lot of runoff during monsoons storms. This high volume of water can be a problem. So the question is how can we make surfaces more permeable, but still enable them to achieve their function?

How will your students direct storm water in to the ground and maintain a functional city?

Storm Water
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