alt Hacker NewsIt would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.
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fragmede • yesterday at 11:06 PM
Tell that to Fukushima.
It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.
In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.
I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.