Californian Urban Street Gets Massive Cool Down – With Paint
With summer comes fresh watermelon, longer days, trips to the sea or pool, and heatwaves.
LA’s Canoga Park municipality wants to keep everyone cool this summer, so it looked for innovative ways to cool down the neighborhood.
Councilman Bob Blumenfield, was excited for the temperature controlled new street seals that were poured into the Los Angeles district.
“It’s awesome. It’s very cool — both literally and figuratively,” Blumenfield, whose Los Angeles district includes Canoga Park, told Los Angeles Daily News. “We are trying to control ‘the heat island effect’ ” — or hotter temperatures caused by urban sprawl.
Canoga Park is the first municipality in California that is testing a reflective street surface officials say could cut public road temperatures, cool the insides of nearby buildings, lessen air pollution, and reduce the threat of deaths linked to increasingly hotter heat waves.
If the new seal could boost solar reflectivity —and dramatically cool a street lined with two-story apartments in the hottest region of the San Fernando Valley — it could do it anywhere, city officials said.
The new CoolSeal, which has proven to reduce temperatures from 70 degrees Celcius to 60 degrees Celcius, will appear in 14 other districts in California before the end of June 2018, giving everyone some relief from the hot summer sun.
