#sewer — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/16/jenrick-cuts-benefits-disabled-people-foreign-nationals. Of course #ReformUK want to cut #benefits for the #disabled & "foreign nationals"! They are the Party of #hate, #Racism, #ableism, #homophobia & every other form of #bigotry! Their #politicians are as #corrupt as all Hell! Theirs is the #politics of the #sewer!

Princeton NJ names winners of the “Name the Drain” contest

#princeton #nj #drains #sewer
http://www.princetonnj.gov/m/NewsFlash/Home/Detail/800

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/07/tory-plan-ban-foreign-nationals-social-housing-condemned-divisive. The word that SHOULD be employed is not so much "divisive" - although this #policy IS #divisive - but #racist! The #Tories are dealing in the #politics of the #sewer!

Research - #RainBarrels and Other Household Stormwater Strategies Are Working — For Now.

May 5, 2026

Excerpt: " 'When we talk about #CircularEconomy, most people think about #recycling waste and materials. But the concept of circular economy also applies to water. Here we're talking about installing #rainwater #cisterns, reusing water from the sink to flush toilets and using water-efficient appliances. While those may seem like small steps at the individual level, we found that if they are widely adopted, they can have a significant collective impact,' said Fernanda Cruz Rios, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering, who was a co-author of the research. 'They help reduce demand on the municipal supply, and the energy needed to treat and distribute that water. But what we found was that these strategies offer a real double benefit. In areas like #PhiladelphiaPA and #CamdenME, that are particularly vulnerable due to their proximity to large bodies of water, we were able to see a meaningful reduction in flooding volumes when circular water strategies were adopted.'

"Despite the ongoing compliance efforts, the cities of Philadelphia and Camden have around 16 billion gallons of combined #sewer overflow, according to reports from their respective water utilities.

"Over the last two and a half decades, Camden has established a stormwater management plan, including decentralized strategies, an upgrade to #stormwater infrastructure and storm water management modeling. To understand the overall impact of these efforts, in hopes of applying findings to other vulnerable urban areas, the Drexel team created a computer model of stormwater movement using data from Cramer Hill, a neighborhood of Camden in the state’s 'coastal hazard zone' that is highly susceptible to tidal and storm-surge flooding.

"The researchers structured the model so that it could quantify the distinct effects of outdoor strategies (cisterns and rain barrels) and indoor strategies — efficient fixtures and reusing sink wash water (#greywater) for toilet flushing. It simulated and measured the effect of 16 different combinations of strategies, ranging from rain barrels of different sizes, to varying levels of adoption of water-efficient fixtures and greywater reuse.

"Each scenario was simulated using precipitation and tidal data from 2014 as a baseline and flooding measurements projected at locations across the neighborhood and at five stormwater outfall areas that contribute to combined sewer overflow discharges into the #DelawareRiver.

The results show that the combination of retrofitting homes with #WaterEfficientFixtures as well as installing rain barrels and practicing greywater reuse, when adopted by 75% of households, could reduce the volume of combined sewer overflows by as much as 11% and the volume of #floodwaters by up to 13%.

" 'This finding is an important and encouraging piece of information for municipalities that are facing similar challenges,' Marques said. 'Although broad adoption of these measures can be challenging to achieve, confirmation of its effectiveness may help to make the case.' "

Read more:
https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2026/May/decentralized-stormwater-management-coastal-urban-areas-combined-sewer

#SolarPunkSunday #ClimateChangeAdaptation #Graywater #StormwaterSeparation #StormwaterReduction #WaterCisterns #UrbanPlanning #WaterUse #WaterIsLife #ClimateChange

Possibly not much chance of succeeding as too many UK #politicians prefer to swim in the #X #sewer than do something to prevent the flow of sh!t from #Musk.

But worth signing I think.

https://action.eko.org/a/uk-government-ban-x-now

We Tried To Interview the Ninja Turtles but Immediately Caught Typhoid Fever and Hepatitis A From Walking Through the New York City Sewer System

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://hard-drive.net/we-tried-to-interview-the-ninja-turtles-but-immediately-caught-typhoid-fever-and-hepatitis-a-from-walking-through-the-new-york-city-sewer-system/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/05/starmer-attacks-greens-saying-vote-for-labour-rivals-puts-new-workers-rights-at-risk. That is both absurd & a blatant #Starmer #lie. He is dragging #Labour #politics into the #sewer, never mind the #gutter, @ZackPolanski, @thegreenparty, @ChrisMayLA6. If he can't do better than that, the #LabourParty richly deserves to be electorally annihilated in May!

“Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything”*…

Insofar as (at the risk of sounding tautological) transformative technologies are concerned, Neil Postman is surely right. But then, as Roy Amara pointed out, “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” David Oks uses a common myth of technological replacement to illustrate– and more specifically, to observe that there’s a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks.

He begins by recounting an interview a few months ago of J. D. Vance by Ross Douthat in which (in response to a question from Douthat about the potential downsides of AI, in particular the prospect of its “obsoleting” human workers) Vance responded sanguinely, arguing that ATM machines didn’t eliminate bank tellers. Indeed, Vance suggested, “we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work…”

There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.

The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession…

… But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:

So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

The answer, I think, is complementarity.

In my last piece, on why I don’t think imminent mass job loss from AI is likely, I talked a lot about complementarity. The core point I made was that labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage: the relevant question for labor impacts is not whether AI can do the tasks that humans can do, but rather whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone. And I suggested that given the vast number of frictions and bottlenecks that exist in any human domain—domains that are, after all, defined around human labor in all its warts and eccentricities, with workflows designed around humans in mind—we should expect to see a serious gap between the incredible power of the technology and its impacts on economic life.

That gap will probably close faster than previous gaps did: AI is not “like” electricity or the steam engine; an AI system is literally a machine that can think and do things itself. But the gap exists, and will exist even as the technology continues to amaze us with what it can now accomplish.

But by talking about why ATMs didn’t displace bank tellers but iPhones did, I want to highlight an important corollary, which is that the true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms. This is the famous lesson of electricity and productivity growth, which I’ll return to in a future piece. When a technology automates some of what a human does within an existing paradigm, even the vast majority of what a human does within it, it’s quite rare for it to actually get rid of the human, because the definition of the paradigm around human-shaped roles creates all sorts of bottlenecks and frictions that demand human involvement. It’s only when we see the construction of entirely new paradigms that the full power of a technology can be realized. The ATM substituted tasks; but the iPhone made them irrelevant…

[Oks unpacks the stories of the ATM’s and iPhone’s impact on banking, then looks ahead, by anaology, to what might be in store with AI. He concludes…]

… I am not a “denier” on the question of technological job loss; Vance’s blithe optimism is not mine. But I’m skeptical that simply slotting AI into human-shaped jobs will have the results people seem to expect. The history of technology, even exceptionally powerful general-purpose technology, tells us that as long as you are trying to fit capital into labor-shaped holes you will find yourself confronted by endless frictions: just as with electricity, the productivity inherent in any technology is unleashed only when you figure out how to organize work around it, rather than slotting it into what already exists. We are still very much in the regime of slotting it in. And as long as we are in that regime, I expect disappointing productivity gains and relatively little real displacement.

The real productivity gains from AI—and the real threat of labor displacement—will come not from the “drop-in remote worker,” but from something like Dwarkesh Patel’s vision of the fully-automated firm. At some point in the life of every technology, old workflows are replaced by new ones, and we discover the paradigms in which the full productive force of a technology can best be expressed. In the past this has simply been a fact of managerial turnover or depreciation cycles. But with AI it will likely be the sheer power of the technology itself, which really is wholly unlike anything that has come before, and unlike electricity or the steam engine will eventually be able to build the structures that harness its powers by itself.

I don’t think we’ve really yet learned what those new structures will look like. But, at the limit, I don’t quite know why humans have to be involved in those: though I suspect that by the time we’re dealing with the fully-automated organizations of the future, our current set of concerns will have been largely outmoded by new and quite foreign ones, as has always been the case with human progress.

But, however optimistic I might be about the human future, I don’t think it’s worth leaning on the history of past technologies for comfort. The ATM parable is a comforting narrative; and in times of uncertainty and fear we search naturally for solace and comfort wherever it may come. But even when it comes to bank tellers, it’s only the first half of the story…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did.”

As to whether the wisdom of Amara and Oks is widely-shared, consider this from Crunchbase:

Crunchbase data shows global venture investment totaled $189 billion in February — the largest startup funding month on record — although 83% of capital raised went to just three companies. They include OpenAI, which raised $110 billion, also in the largest round ever raised by a private, venture-backed company.

The record month for venture funding took place against the backdrop of a trillion-dollar stock market drop as AI compute and tooling unsettled leading public software companies. [See also here.]

All told, venture investment was up close to 780% year over year from the $21.5 billion raised by startups in February 2025.

OpenAI was not the only company to raise tens of billions of dollars last month. Its closest rival, Anthropic, raised $30 billion, marking the third-largest venture round on record.

Waymo, Alphabet‘s self-driving division, raised $16 billion. Together, those three rounds totaled $156 billion, representing 83% of the global venture capital raised in February.

A further four companies each raised $1 billion or more last month: Tokyo-based semiconductor manufacturer Rapidus; London-based self-driving platform Wayve; San Francisco-based AI for robotics World Labs; and Sunnyvale, California-based AI semiconductor company Cerebras Systems.

These massive rounds were led by strategic corporate investors, a host of private equity and alternative investors, as well as a few multistage venture investors and a government agency…

– “Massive AI Deals Drive $189B Startup Funding Record In February While Public Software Stocks Reel“

As Carlota Perez explains in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, we’re forever blowing bubbles…

* Neil Postman

###

As we contemplate change, we might send sanitary, odor-free birthday greetings to Sir Joseph William Bazalgette; he was born on this date in 1819.  A civil engineer, he became chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, in which role his major achievement was a response to the “Great Stink of 1858,” in July and August of 1858, during which very hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent.  Bazalgette oversaw the creation of a sewer network for central London which addressed the problem– and was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics, in beginning the cleansing of the River Thames, and in creating (a crucial part of) the infrastructure that underlay its extraordinary growth over the next century.

source

#Michigan - Oakland County #RainSmart program expected to keep millions of gallons of #water out of #sewer - here's how

By Amber Eikenberry
Published January 27, 2026 12:51pm

OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. (FOX 2) - "Two years of helping Oakland County residents install green infrastructure is expected to keep 1.4 million gallons of stormwater out of the sewer system annually.

"During the two-year RainSmart Rebates pilot program, residents located in the George W. Kuhn Drain Drainage District were able to receive money to install rain gardens, rain barrels, and native trees to their yards.

Participants were able to install one garden, up to two trees, and two rain barrels after an evaluation of their property to determine which infrastructure would work best.

By the numbers:

According to Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner Jim Nash, the second year of the program, which started in 2024 and just wrapped up, saw a 22% increase in participation from 2024.

This past year, 379 rain barrels, 199 native trees, and 105 rain gardens were installed.

In 2024, there were 159 rain barrels, 98 trees, and 49 rain gardens installed.

Since the pilot began, nearly 300 residents have participated. A total of more than $176,000 rebates were distributed, with the average participant receiving $500 for their projects.

Why it matters:

Flooding is a major issue in many parts of #MetroDetroit, especially in cities that are part of the #GeorgeWKuhnDrain Drainage District, including all or part of Berkley, Beverly Hills, Birmingham, Clawson, Ferndale, Hazel Park, Huntington Woods, Madison Heights, Oak Park, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, Royal Oak Township, Southfield, and Troy,

This is because it is a combined sewer system. In a combined system, #wastewater and #stormwater both flow through the same pipes, known as gray infrastructure, and go to a wastewater treatment plant.

This means that during periods of intense rain like Metro Detroit has been seeing more frequently, the system can get overwhelmed. The result? Flooded streets and backups into homes.

Also, there is a greater likelihood of contaminants making it into the system. This is a concern even for homes not on a combined sewer system.

Rain barrels, trees, and native plant gardens all help reduce the amount of rainwater that makes it to the sewer system."

Read more:
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/oakland-county-rainsmart-program-expected-keep-millions-gallons-water-out-sewer-heres-how

#SolarPunkSunday #WaterCollection #Rainbarrels #NativePlants #NativeTrees #RainGardens #TreePlanting

LOL it's never good when you can HEAR THE SUCKING from your toilets
#sewer

Fatberg weighing 100 tonnes discovered in east London sewer https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/22/100-tonne-fatberg-discovered-in-east-london-sewer

#London #environment #sewer

#Player #Handout for the Undercity in Return of the Ripper.

Thanks to @Printdevil for the artwork!

Text added by me using #Inkscape. #Fonts are Shakespeare First Folio for the river names and Vox Populi for the rest. Then nudged around with the Tweak Objects tool.

#TTRPG #DCCRPG #DCC #DungeonCrawlClassics #Horror #Sewer

New Thames Tideway ‘bulges’ open as public spaces atop London’s super sewer

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/new-thames-tideway-bulges-open-as-public-spaces-atop-londons-super-sewer-85476/

3pm updates from NYC Board of Elections say 1.45 to 1.5M votes have come in, easily breaking recent records (1.2M).
Total estimates project 1.9 to 2.2M, approaching the 1969 record of 2.46M (biggest was '65, 2.6M).
Big numbers reinforce the strong possibility of a #MamdaniMandate
#Democratic #Socialist #model for #Democrats to #win #progressive #policies #sewer #Socialism #NYC #bus #daycare #tax the #rich #cheaper #groceries #NewYorkCity #grocery #store #Mayor #ZohranMamdani

Honestly, fuck this. Absolute #cultural #sewer stuff.

Where do the waters go?

Experience the full log at https://auriscenes.com/log/268

#HearNewWorlds #sewer #planet #SoundDesign

Interceptor Sewers: the thread about Victorian efforts to clean up the Water of Leith

1. The first part of Edinburgh’s sewage history covered the East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadows.
2. The second part of Edinburgh’s sewage history looked at the sewage problems of the Victorian city and how to fix them

At the end of part 2 of this story, Edinburgh and Leith (separate burghs at this time) had finally agreed the terms of an “Interceptor Sewer” for the Water of Leith. What is an Interceptor Sewer? It is a sewer that “intercepts” other sewers and collects their output before it can discharge some place else; in this case into the river of the Water of Leith. This sewer could intercept all the untreated human and animal waste that was currently discharging into the river and carry it safely off somewhere else, out of sight and out of mind. The construction of the interceptor sewer began immediately after approval of the parliamentary bill in 1864, and took 3 years to complete. The engineers were David and Thomas Stevenson.

The 1864 Interceptor as we shall call it comprises some 5.2 miles (8.4km) of brick-built, egg-shaped sewer. This is the optimum shape for a sewer, ensuring good flow at low volumes, being “self scouring” and requiring a less wide excavation than a circular sewer of the same cross-sectional area.

The interceptor follows the course of the Water of Leith, from the “irrigated meadow” at Roseburn park – where the Lochrin Burn discharged the waste of the south west of the city – to the Black Rocks off of Leith. It runs along the river banks in places and along the river bed itself in others. An exception is near Bonnington in Leith where it takes a more direct route, directly under the industries which had been using the river as their sewer.

The sewer intercepted some 180 outflows into the river by the method shown below, which meant the old sewers would still overflow into the river during storm events, the internal weir directed most of the waste into the main interceptor. The interceptor got larger as it went downstream to account for the progressively increased volume of waste being added to it.

The brick-built interceptor is around 2.5 feet wide (I couldn’t find a precise measure), with some sections between 2 and 3 feet wide of cast iron pipe, and where it hits the Shore at Leith (picture above) it becomes a 3 foot 6″ pipe, set 20 feet back from the quayside. It is ideally sited to take much of the waste of Leith (which historically either flowed into the river, or was directed towards the shore). The outflow was at a depth 17 feet below the high water spring tides, with the outflow generally being carried away down the Firth of Forth east by the tide. The cost of this scheme was “about £70,000 [£8.9M in current money], entailing a special drainage-rate of 2/6d per £ on the rental within the [catchment area]“.

The pin marked “1864 vent” on the map refers to that curious, square-section “chimney” above the river weir in St. Mark’s Park. It’s not a chimney at all, but a “stink pipe” or sewer vent. Noxious gasses and air compressed by storm events can escape here.

The 1864 Interceptor did exactly what it was designed to do, and was very successful at it. It was calculated to carry 600 cubic feet per minute at the outflow, but even by the time it was completed the requirement had more than doubled to 1,340 cubic feet as the population had exploded along its route; “in some cases fivefold“. So the additional waste from the city simply overtopped the collection weirs and continued to find its way into the river.

There was also the continued problem of the waste collecting in the old mill lades at Coltbridge (Roseburn) and Stockbridge, and the same old story of reluctant owners and landlords and fragmented ownership making it very difficult to get anything done about these. In 1873, after nearly 10 years of to-and-fro, the “Edinburgh Improvement Trust” was ready to abandon trying to sort things out. Not even a “forceful petition from Stockbridge residents” having had the required effect. By 1884, a survey by the Trust found that the Coltbridge mill dam had accumulated behind it a 4 foot depth of solid, compacted human excrement and 7.5 feet depth of more liquid matter; the situation was intolerable.

In 1885, the Edinburgh Corporation stepped in and had the Coltbridge mill lades and dam certified as a public health nuisance and obtained an order requiring the owners to clean it up. In the words of the Corporation’s presiding officer:

A deposit of putrescent sewage and other decomposing organic matter [which] is continually evolving noxious gases and germs, of a nature to produce and provoke miasmatic and malarious disease, and to endanger the health of persons who reside in, or who have occasion to frequent the neighbourhood.

Edinburgh’s preferred solution was to fill the mill lades and demolish the weirs below the Coltbridge to cause the river to flow better and scour itself, but leave the lower weir at Leith Mills as a sewage trap. Leith was of course less than pleased by this and the two councils went back to wrangling. The Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1887 gave the Corporation the powers of compulsory purchase along the Stockbridge “Great Lade” (marked brown on the map below). This power they exercised, causing the lade to be progressively bought up and filled in from 1891-1893.

A more coordinated approach was required however; in addition to the burghs of Edinburgh and Leith, the Parishes of Colinton and Currie, the County of Midlothian, the Sewerage Commission, the Dock Commission, and the Edinburgh and District Water Trust all had an interest. It was Leith though, that really drove action, after all they were at the bottom of the river so subject to any sewage in the river from their upstream neighbours. They were ill-served by the over-capacity 1864 Interceptor and they were most directly dependent on the water for livelihood and prosperity. Leith Town Council commissioned a series of public health and sewerage reports in 1885 and 1886 to set out the problem and had the whole course of the river surveyed from the uppermost mill to the sea, to detail the causes.

Edinburgh finally got on board with Leith, and together they commissioned a joint report in 1887 that proposed the construction of a duplicate interceptor sewer for the Water of Leith, along a longer course and with a much greater capacity. This sewer would remedy the shortcomings of the 1864 scheme and would serve to once and for all satisfy the requirements of both Edinburgh and Leith regards sewage disposal, and it was to be adequate for the next fifty years of expected growth in demand. Long-term thinking at last!

And so it was that the Water of Leith Purification and Sewerage Act, 1889 (you can read the full provisions online, here, all 70 pages of them) went before parliament; opposed by 16 groups of petitioners, mainly mill owners and industries determined to protect their rights to abstract water from the river and discharge effluent into it.

The act passed, and work proceeded on an altogether grander scheme for the whole river, some 22.5 miles long, with a diameter increasing from 4 feet upstream to 9’3″ x 7’2″ downstream. The scheme also included a branch for The Stank, the burn cum drain cum sewer that drained the village of Corstorphine, and the marshy land and farms of the Gyle area into the Water of Leith at Roseburn.

The 1889 Interceptor largely follows that of 1864 between Coltbridge and Stockbridge and the two are interconnected in places. At sections it takes a more direct shortcut, allowing the 1864 to continue to intercept the sewers at the river, while channelling the upstream waste by a more direct route to the sea. After Stockbridge the 1889 route heads away from the river to take a more direct route to the sea, running directly under Pilrig Park and Leith Links (where construction was easier), serving the expanding district between Edinburgh and Leith along Leith Walk.

The vent for the 1889 sewer is behind St. Mary’s School on the Links, on the site of the old Roperie, It is another apparently isolated “chimney” and has always proved very hard to get a decent photo of! now that the 15 years and more of being hidden in a stalled building development it is much easier to access. I wonder if the residents of those fancy new townhouses realise what the public “feature” in front of their windows really is!

The two sewers now served a catchment area that was where the city was expanding fastest, shown by the pale orange area in the map below (they also served much of South Leith)

Long story short, the 1889 scheme was so successful that in 1896 the Edinburgh Corporation found itself needing to secure powers to pass by-laws to protect fishing rights in the river that only a few years before had been nothing but a stinking sewer! The river Purification Act had done exactly that. That said it was only the river which had been purified; the sewage was still entirely untreated and discharged directly into the Firth of Forth off the Black Rocks, where it joined by the effluent from the Old Town and the Southside of the city that flowed through the Irrigated Meadows system to enter the Firth of Forth at Fillyside. But that will be a further thread to cover the final part of this story.

The last part of this story is the thread about the great untold engineering feat of Edinburgh’s 1970s Interceptor Sewers and the grand scheme to clean up the Firth of Forth.

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