Orange County Register

Walk beneath the full-sized blue whale sculpture hanging from the ceiling, past a diver floating in a giant fish tank, and out the back door, and you’ll find what the people at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific hope is a glimpse of Southern California’s future: a ‘carbon-neutral’ building and exhibit space, with solar panels so charged up they’re producing more energy than the building itself requires.

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“This is as green as you can get,” said Barbara Long, the aquarium’s vice president of special projects. “It’s totally powered by solar. We’re off the grid.”

The place is rigged for kids. The building will serve as a classroom for children and adults and is made with recycled and “sustainable” materials. Next to it stands an exhibit area called “Our Watersheds: Pathway to the Pacific,” shaded by a roof arrayed with solar panels.

Beneath it: an expansive, three-dimensional model of the mountains and land surface that drains into the San Gabriel River.

It’s at least the size of two pool tables, with the San Gabriel Mountains at one end, drainage channels, freeways and land surface in the middle, and San Pedro Bay at the other. The best part: the kids can make it rain. Punch a button and showers cover the mountains and the land, running down the rivers and channels into the bay.

It’s meant as a lesson on how watersheds work, not to mention how pollution contaminates them and flows into the ocean.

To underscore the point, the children are likely to encounter the aquarium’s kestrel, or sparrow hawk, named Orion, and Elvis, a California king snake. Both species are native to the basin, and both can be harmed by pesticides that accumulate in the bodies of their prey.

Adults who attend continuing education classes in the building itself will take a seat on plastic chairs made from recycled materials, beneath ceiling beams made of wood certified as sustainable, and held up by concrete walls grouted with “fly ash,” ash from coal-plant burning that is captured instead of being released into the air.

The building has other not-so-high-tech features.

“We have windows that open,” Long said. “In this climate, most of the time, if you open the windows you don’t need air conditioning. It’s passive climate control.”

On top of the thickly insulated roof, native deer grasses and other plants are growing. When the kids wash their hands in a sink outside, the “gray water” is pumped upward to irrigate the vegetation. Any excess flows into a native plant garden on the ground.

“Eventually we’re going to turn off all the irrigation systems,” Long said. “The plants will grow on their own.”

If they ever take off, plant-covered roofs could help ease the effects of climate change, she said. Part of what is making things hotter in urban areas is the heat-island effect, when the concrete and asphalt of cities retains heat and drives up temperatures.

“In our own small way, we’re minimizing the urban heat-island impact,” Long said. “It will take a lot of social movement, not just our one building.”

The building opens to the public Saturday. (Photos shot by Jebb Harris).

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