Group asks drivers to ‘Go Dirty for the Drought’

If you want to reach out to Southern Californians with an important message, post it where it counts — their cars.

That was the basic premise behind “Go Dirty for the Drought,” an awareness campaign suggested by Rachel Stich, a 2003 La Cañada High School graduate who works for the environmental organization Los Angeles Waterkeeper in Santa Monica.

Stich said the group — which normally focuses on protecting and restoring local waterways through litigation, enforcement and monitoring — wanted to get people thinking and talking about the severity of California’s drought and was looking for a clever way to do it.

That’s when the 29-year-old events and communication director shared an idea that gained traction.

“I thought in terms of L.A., with us being such a car-obsessed culture and people commuting to work and sitting in traffic…what if we could so something with cars?” she recalls.

Her co-workers liked it, and together they sketched out an idea where people would pledge not to wash their cars as a gesture of conservation and drought awareness and spread the message as part of a grass-roots campaign.

Stich worked with LA Waterkeeper Executive Director Liz Crosson to develop the details. And thus was born the Dirty Car Pledge, a campaign that has grown to include 5,000 cars and been featured on “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” and KPCC’s “Air Talk” with host Larry Mantle.

Interested drivers visit lawaterkeeper.org and make a promise not to wash their cars for 60 days. Then LA Waterkeeper mails a static sticker to be placed in car windows explaining the grime as an environmental cause and, hopefully, hooking the attention of fellow gridlock surfers.

Photos of pledge-takers with their cars are piling up on Twitter at #DirtyCarPledge, and an Los Angeles-wide billboard campaign has helped spread the word.

“It’s just been amazing, the people who’ve reached out to me wanting to get involved,” Stich says.

Aside from inspiring fun and easy water wisdom, Go Dirty for the Drought puts participants in touch with some staggering statistics. For example, the average Angeleno uses as many as 129 gallons of water each day, enjoying home car washes that take an average of 85 gallons per session, the group reports.

“The mission of the campaign is to raise awareness about the drought and empower individuals to conserve water in their daily lives,” says Crosson.

Although the campaign has an unspecified shelf life, LA Waterkeeper’s immediate goal is to get 10,000 pledges, representing roughly 3 million gallons of water saved in a 60-day period, according to Crosson.

Stich has managed to get a cohort of La Cañada friends and family members to take the pledge. Among them is Dianeh Sablan, a longtime school friend all too happy to slap a sticker on her 2004 Toyota Solara in support of a friend and a worthwhile cause.

“I was definitely aware there was a drought, but I didn’t take it as serious,” confesses Sablan. “I can say this campaign has shined a light on this issue for me.”

That was the idea behind the “Go Dirty for the Drought” campaign, according to Stich.

“We’re doing a good job if people are talking about it,” she says.