Daniela Kirshenbaum of Fog City Journal raises a question that's bugged us for years, mainly why is it everytime it rains we get instantly flooded? For those of you who lived in any part of the country that wasn't San Francisco (or California for that matter), you can attest that when it rains, there's minimal flooding (except, of course, for when it rains a lot and you get actual flooding). What we mean is that any normal rainstorm doesn't cause huge puddles of rain that flood up streets and sidewalks. It seems that it doesn't take much for any sort of rainstorm to cause the flooding.
So why is it?
Well, it's a matter of sewage. San Francisco just doesn't have enough of it. And what we do have is single-pipelines, which obviously can't hold as much rainfall as double-pipelines, the kind of pipelines most cities have. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report last year on the State of Our Sewers and determined that if we were to be graded, we would get a D+ and avoid getting an F only because because we bought them an apple and stayed after class a few days to clean the erasers. It doesn't help that our sewers are falling apart too.
So what can be done? Well, the water department came up with Sandbag Saturdays (wheee!) to help people put up sandbags when it rains. Then there's trying to fix our sewage problems and as well as demanding that new buildings being add more sewage space.
We shall see. But until then, we're going to keep on being puddle jumpers.
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Most younger cities do have two-pipe separated systems, instead of our old school one-pipe combined system. But that's not such a bad thing for us...
The deal with separated systems was that all the sewage got treated at the plant before it went out into the bay/river/ocean/whatever, while the rainfall washed straight out of the system. These systems were built back when people thought that rainfall was mostly clean and pretty and nice and we didn't care if it washed out to sea. Combined systems were considered a drag because during rainstorms, all the rain would go to the treatment plant along with all the sewage and it would take forever to treat and the pipes would back up and it just generally sucked for everyone.
But nowadays combined systems are looking like a pretty good idea. As society has become more hip to environmental needs, and as the air has gotten dirtier, and as cities have paved over more and more open space and put more gas-guzzling, oil-leaking cars on the road, the idea of putting rainfall (which starts in polluted skies and runs over oily streets before collecting in the sewer system) straight into the bay seems kind of sketchy.
Many environmental regulation nerds (and we're good people, we can talk about things at parties other than sewage, like sports and movies and stuff; we liked Borat, for example) think that it's only a matter of time before separated systems get outlawed and all runoff - sewage AND oily overland runoff from rainfall - has to be treated and cleaned at the plant before it's put back in the bay. This law would be GREAT for the bay.
This doesn't mean we don't need to fix our sewers. We definitely do. Cool old combined systems are like beat-up old Ford T-Birds. They're way better than those crappy T-Birds from the late 80s (separated systems), but if you don't replace the transmission and change the gas lines and stuff they end up running like, uh, sewage.
One solution is to rip up a lot of the concrete in the Sunset, Richmond, and other places to create more yard/grass/greenspace - so the water can absorb into the ground. Less runoff. There have been trial balloons floated for this.
But lo! Who opposes this? The West Side & Pac Heights NIMBYs, led in part by the guffawing horse "I Got Mine" Kirshenbaum, who believe their property rights and views and confort ARE MORE IMPORTANT than anything else in SF. Even were the city to offer incentives to make green-like with the front yards, betcha a zillion Kirshenbaum would be the first to call it a Fisher Plot.