The sewers I’ve seen in TV and cartoons makes it look like the house pipes all dump into one big tunnel, with a river of nasty just kind of there. What’s happening to move/process everything?
In: Engineering
Yeah, it’s pretty much a big tube of awful. But it moves just like a pipe drains water into a storm drain. Things move via gravity until they hit a pumping station that provides pressure to get up over hills and gradients and into treatment facilities and such.
Most of the systems are pressurized, until you reach old sewers which were essentially just drainage systems or major systems like new york city’s system with large intakes at street level to take in drain watee. Many of these systems are kept in motion by a series of pumps which infinitely cycle water through the system to keep it flowing but it’s really not necessary in large areasnlike NYC where the population density is so high that water is constantly flowing from homes and businesses into the system.
Eventually all roads lead to rome, except this rome is a single or a series of waste water management facilities that process the water and clean it up through a complex system of both natural and chemical processes until it’s clean enough to either recycle into the system again for use by people or is dumped into a natural water table such as a river or the ocean.
Fun fact: the angle of fall for a sewer has to be just right. Too shallow and things slow down, too steep and the water flows away, leaving the nasty behind.
Latest Answers