• @grue
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    1 year ago

    I didn’t know sewage was flushed into the river alongside the storm waters

    With combined sewers (sewers that handle wastewater and storm water in the same pipes), it’s generally not that they’re just flushing sewage into the river; it’s that they’re trying to run all the water – wastewater and stormwater – through the water treatment plants but failing when the rainfall is too much. The portion they can’t handle overflows into the river.

    Combined sewers are pretty common in areas with older infrastructure. Atlanta, for instance, has recently been forced by a court’s consent decree to spend something like $4 billion fixing (among other things) overflows from the combined sewer system downtown in order to clean up the Chattahoochee River and South River.

    (Incidentally, that’s the cost to build gigantic overflow tunnels capable of handling extreme rain events, just like Paris is doing – properly rebuilding the sewer system downtown to handle wastewater and stormwater separately would have been even more expensive.)