I was reading an old report from the city and found a stat about concrete that stopped me cold

I was looking up some old zoning stuff for a job, you know, just routine paperwork, and I came across a city report from 1995. It said that back then, the amount of concrete poured in the county in a single year was about 1.2 million cubic yards. I looked up the current number out of curiosity, and it's over 4 million now. That's more than triple in under 30 years. I'm the one out here pressure washing it all, so I see it every day, but seeing those numbers side by side made my stomach drop. It's not just buildings, it's parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, all of it sealing the ground. I always figured we were building more, but the scale of that increase hit me differently. It feels like we're literally paving over the problem instead of fixing it. Has anyone else stumbled on a local fact that made a big global issue feel suddenly, weirdly real?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_wyatt7d ago

Yeah, finding old maps of my neighborhood did that for me.

miles_hall7d ago

Sealing the ground" is the part that gets me. I saw a study about how that messes with the water table, making floods way worse downstream.

lilya767d ago

I mean, is that really the main cause though. Most places have drainage systems for a reason, so it's not like the water has nowhere to go. Maybe the study was looking at a really specific spot.