La Paloma Family Services provides shelter, counseling, guidance and assistance to Arizona’s at-risk children and families. When planning for a new building in 2007, La Paloma management included native plant landscaping and water harvesting into the building plans. Butterfly roofs with attached scuppers bring most roof runoff from the facilities into the courtyard.
TFS installed five custom culvert cisterns with rainhead screens built into the lids to store water funneled from these scuppers. The cisterns are connected underground, to fill and drain as one system, and feed an automated irrigation system. This serves as a low-maintenance solution to providing supplemental water and a more lush courtyard landscape.
In addition to rainwater storage, a rain chain added to one scupper brings rainwater into a sunken planter for passive irrigation.