What’s that smell coming from the basement?
All drainage systems have their limitations and New York City’s is 1.75 inches of rainfall per hour. Unfortunately for many New Yorkers, the storm that deluged the region on Friday dropped more than two inches between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. — and then kept on coming.
The limit on the capacity of the city’s network of drains, pipes and water-treatment plants is the main reason New Yorkers across all five boroughs suffered through flooding. And this probably will not be the city’s last bout with heavy flooding as it plays catch-up with the pace of climate change, experts said.
“This changing weather pattern is the result of climate change, and the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” said Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.
And we still refuse to do anything about it, so expect more floods and droughts and lethal heatwaves.
The rush-hour downpour on Friday overwhelmed the 7,400 miles of pipes that carry storm water and sewage under the city’s hard surfaces to treatment plants or into the nearest rivers and bays. The runoff backed up into the streets, causing flooding that swamped cars and seeped into basements and subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens.
Note the sewage part. This is sewage that’s seeping into basements.
About 60 percent of New York City has a drainage system that combines storm runoff with sewage in the same pipes. When the flow through those pipes is more than double what the sewage treatment plants were designed to handle, the excess — a mix of rain and untreated sewage — goes straight into local waterways like the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the East River or Jamaica Bay.
But as the sewer system backs up, some of that untreated wastewater winds up in the basements of homes and businesses around the city.
So that’s always nice.
Maybe we should all take up residence on cruise ships?
Reminds me of the story told by Lewis Mumford (‘The City in History.’) Residents of Edinburgh pre-sewers had the quaint habitt of yelling out ‘gardy loo’ as a warning, before heaving the contents of their household shit bucket (chamber pot) out into the street, and from whatever floor of their building. The term was a corruption of the French ‘garde de l’eau’ which meant ‘look out for the water!’ From that we get the term ‘loo,’ meaning dunny, shithouse, toilet, water closet, etc, etc, etc.
Perhaps ‘garde de reiviere’ might get picked up by New Yorkers.
Most eastern cities have combined sewer systems, where rainwater mixes with the sewage. They will overflow quickly in a large rain, even without global warming.
In the midwest, most of the sewers are sewage only, blocked from the rainwater. They don’t overflow very often, but the untreated rainwater dumps into the water bodies, carrying all the garbage from yards, houses, streets, etc.
In Nebraska, our sewage treatment facility had recently increased capacity, so it can hold nearly 3 times what the town produces. They don’t see that as a way of preventing sewage overflow so much as a way to try to increase the population size by 5X.
If humans are so ingenious, there should be an answer to both these problems (it’s suggested in my third paragraph). We could fix it…but it would cost money. And few, if any, city councils are eager to spend large sums of money on shit. At least, until the overflow occurs and taxpayers wonder why.
We all know what happens to organisms whose ability to adapt fails to keep up with the pace of its changing environment. Humans are numerous and resourceful enough to be around for a long time (even if it is ultimately in only small numbers, in widely spaced patches). Civilization is another story. Its dependence on the combination of cheap, reliable energy, and immediate access to material resources on a planetary scale makes it vulnerable to disruptions of either. The unacknowledged and unprotected foundation of all of this economic activity is a healthy, thriving biosphere, which is needed to keep the soft, squishy humans who think they’re in charge alive.
A healthy biosphere means leaving leaving large swathes of Earth “undeveloped” so it can go on doing what it’s doing, unhindered. Civilization doesn’t do well with “undeveloped,” as it regards such “unused” spaces in much the same way an artist or writer might look at a blank canvas, or empty page, believing its plans for use can only ever be an improvement on what is already there. There’s always that urge to fill in this supposed emptiness, to “improve” the “wasteland, ” and the inability to know when to leave well enough alone. We’ve developed powerful tools and technologies, and claimed exclusive, unlimited ownership of the entire planet before we’ve even learned about everything that constitutes it and how it all works together. We’re clever, but not smart. We aren’t living up to Linnaeus’s wildly optimistic species epithet of “wise,” and have made insufficient progress towards his injunction to know ourself. We’re a bunch of hyperactive, barefoot, psychotic apes with nuclear weapons, throwing our weight around in a house of glass.
The normal operation of civilization, which is now geared to a recklessly dangerous degree towards maximized, short-term returns for only a few, is destroying this biogeochemical foundation. Civilization is autolytic; it is consuming itself, and there’s more concern about who will extract the most out of the world before the whole Ponzi scheme collapses (this is called “winning”), instead of the fact that that this collapse is hastened by continued pursuit of business as usual itself. It’s a game of musical chairs being played by chainsmokers on board the Hindenburg, where the last one left with a chair congratulates himself on his entreprenurial accumen and asbestos underwear, even as the chair he’s on ignites beneath him.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What’s that smell coming from the […]
@ #3: Well put. And so say all of us.