4 ms·
The article concludes: > A long-term solution requires sustained investment of millions of dollars into identifying every illegal connection and correcting it.
by avar 3y ago
The article concludes:
> A long-term solution requires sustained investment of millions of dollars into identifying every illegal connection and correcting it.
Couldn't they just restrict flow through the system when it's not raining?
Then illegal connections would identify themselves in the form of overflowing toilets.
- CameronNemo 3y agoI don't understand how this would work... is there some surefire way of knowing it is raining, and then somehow opening up the storm drains in time for the runoff? Remember that if this automatic opening-closing mechanism fails, you get widespread flooding, likely leading to a lot of property damage and maybe even some lives lost depending on the severity of the storm.
- toast0 3y agoSewers aren't really made in ways that make it easy to restrict their flow in a controlled manner. Storm sewers especially are designed for lots of unrestricted flow. Even if it were possible, purposefully blocking flows so that they overflow into people's homes is an acute sanitary issue, especially when whenever you put a block, everything upstream is going to discharge at the lowest egress... If you're the lucky winner, you get not just your toilet overflowing into your house, but the neighborhood's toilets too. Fixing this will be a big mess, but it'll probably need some amount of inventorying unpermitted buildings, allowing them to connect to sanitary sewers, and then auditing all unpermitted buildings to confirm where their sewage goes. Hopefully people built to make it easy/feasible to to switch to the proper sewer, but unpermitted buildings are what they are, I guess. Putting colored dye down the drains and seeing if it comes out in the storm or sanitary sewers is a lot of work, but that's what it will take.