“Cool Pavement” Tech Lowers Temps in Cities!

How one Cal neighborhood is
guarding against deadly heat

By Todd Woody 

As temperatures hit triple digits on a blue-sky July day in the Los Angeles community of Pacoima, families escape the heat at a local park.

According to a temperature reading, the streets are scorching, with the asphalt radiating 127° Fahrenheit of heat at noon.

An hour later, it rises to 141.8°. “It’s super-hot here,” says Jenifer Ramirez, who lives across the street from Hubert H. Humphrey Memorial Park.”

Relief comes from a work crew spraying a gray-blue material on the street in front of her house. The epoxy acrylic coating made by roofing giant GAF reflects solar infrared radiation that would be absorbed by the asphalt.

After adding a second layer, the pavement will be gray in color, contrasting to the current black. The coating is applied to nearly 1 million square feet of roads, playgrounds, and parking lots in a 10-block area around the park.  About 7,300 people live within a half mile

The first-of-its-kind project aims to lower the ambient air temperature in Pacoima — a lower-income, primarily Latino community — as climate-driven heat waves become more frequent and intense in SoCal.

A 2020 study published in the Journal of Environmental Research Letters found that using such coatings in two L.A. neighborhoods lowered pavement temperatures by up to 10°.

That’s important, as heat absorbed by roads and other surfaces during the day is released at night, keeping temperatures elevated.

“Pacoima is one of the hottest parts of L.A. County and hasn’t gotten the kind of investment like a lot of other communities,” says Jeff Terry, vice president for corporate social responsibility and sustainability at GAF, which is funding the project.

“One of the challenges with urban heating is that it doesn’t stop at night. Hopefully, we’ll make this place a little more livable for the residents.”

Over the next two years, a monitoring program will gather data to quantify temperature changes in the neighborhood that can be used to design cool pavement projects in other communities.

Terry says the second phase of GAF’s “cool community” experiment may involve installing solar-reflective roof shingles in the neighborhood to reduce temperatures in residents’ homes.

GAF says the final cost of the Pacoima project has not yet been determined.

Heat maps released this month by the UCLA show that during extreme temperatures between 2009 and 2018, Pacoima residents made 19,009 excess emergency room visits.

That’s seven times the number in Santa Monica, a similar-sized community in L.A. County.

David Eisenman, a professor of medicine and public health and director at the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters, says that equity, more than environment, explains such disparities in heat-related health effects.”It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Pacoima were a leafier, shaded, and wealthier community,” he says.

“Those communities can protect themselves as streets are shaded, so they don’t accumulate as much heat or give off as much heat at night, and homes are often air-conditioned.”

“You’ll find a three- or fourfold difference between neighborhoods like Pacoima and wealthier neighbors in the same climate zone,” he adds.

The heat maps show that Pacoima, for instance, has three times the number of excess emergency room visits on hot days as Granada Hills, a more affluent and somewhat smaller community just six miles away.

“Cool pavement projects need to be undertaken alongside other efforts to reduce urban heat, such as planting street trees,” says Eisenman. 

L.A. has applied solar-reflective coatings to neighborhood streets before. Still, the Pacoima initiative is the first to extend such materials to “hardscape” at a school and park, according to Greg Spotts, executive officer and chief sustainability officer for StreetsLA, a division of the city of Los Angeles Department of Public Works. 

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