Connect with us

Tech

Cities are scrambling to prevent flooding

Published

on

Cities are scrambling to prevent flooding


Urban centers are more prone to flooding than other areas because streets, parking lots, and buildings are impervious, meaning water can’t seep into the ground the way it would in a forest or grassland. Instead, it flows.

Detroit, like many older cities, deals with flowing stormwater by combining it with sewage. This blend is then pumped to treatment plants. During the recent storm, electrical outages and mechanical issues knocked out four of 12 pumps in two major pump stations.

The agency has spent $10 million over the past several years upgrading just these two pump stations, and hundreds of millions more on other improvements. But fully modernizing the sewer system would require building a separate stormwater network at a cost of over $17 billion.

Stormwater infrastructure around the country is aging, and many governments have resorted to Band-Aid solutions instead of building more resilient systems, says Mikhail Chester, an infrastructure and policy researcher at Arizona State University. And mechanical and electrical systems are bound to fail occasionally during major storms, Chester adds.

However, even if the pump stations had worked perfectly, they might not have prevented disastrous flooding.

Outdated models

Detroit’s pumping stations, similar to a lot of stormwater infrastructure, were designed to keep up with a 10-year storm, meaning an amount of rainfall within an hour that has roughly a one in 10 chance of happening in any given year. A 10-year storm in the Detroit area would amount to about 1.7 inches of rainfall in an hour, according to National Weather Service data.

During the June storm, parts of Detroit saw intense levels of rainfall that would be more characteristic of a 1,000-year storm (over 3.7 inches of rain within an hour), far beyond the capacity of the pumping stations, according to the water authority.

But rainfall predictions are based on historical data that might not represent the true odds of major storms, according to Anne Jefferson, a hydrologist at Kent State University. Storms that supposedly have a one in 10 chance of happening in any given year are likely happening more often now because of climate change. And she says few agencies are taking climate change into account in their infrastructure designs.

“We’re locking ourselves into a past climate,” Jefferson says.

Governments hoping to account for climate change when designing infrastructure face uncertainty—should they plan for the best-case emissions scenarios or the worst? And how exactly emissions will affect rainfall is difficult to predict.

Planning for bigger storms is an admirable goal, but it’s also costly. Bigger pumps and pipes are more expensive to build and harder to install, says Chester. And price increases aren’t linear, he adds—a pump or pipe with double the capacity will be more than double the price in most cases.

Fast forward

Coastal cities face even more dire climate threats, and some are investing aggressively to stave them off. Tampa, Florida, spent $27 million upgrading pump stations and other infrastructure after major floods in 2015 and 2016, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the upgrades appear to be working—this year at least, the city avoided floods during major storms like Hurricane Elsa.

However, the rising seas along Tampa’s shoreline may soon cover up the pumps’ outlets. If sea levels reach the spot where water is supposed to exit storm pipes, the system won’t be able to remove water from the city.

Some cities are looking to install other features, like storm ponds and rain gardens, to help manage urban flooding. Grassy areas like rain gardens can reduce the volume and speed of excess water, Jefferson says. If enough of these facilities are built in the right places, they can help prevent smaller floods, she adds, but like other stormwater infrastructure, they’re usually not designed to stop flooding during larger storms.

Tech

The Download: toxic chemicals, and Russia’s cyberwar tactics

Published

on

The Download: toxic chemicals, and Russia’s cyberwar tactics


What are chemical pollutants doing to our bodies? It’s a timely question given that last week, people in Philadelphia cleared grocery shelves of bottled water after a toxic leak from a chemical plant spilled into a tributary of the Delaware River, a source of drinking water for 14 million people. And it was only last month that a train carrying a suite of other hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, unleashing an unknown quantity of toxic chemicals.

There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. In order to find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? The field of exposomics, which seeks to study our exposure to pollutants, among other factors, could help to give us some much-needed answers. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, Jessica’s weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

Read more:

+ The toxic chemicals all around us. Meet Nicolette Bugher, a researcher working to expose the poisons lurking in our environment and discover what they mean for human health. Read the full story.

+ Building a better chemical factory—out of microbes. Professor Kristala Jones Prather is helping to turn microbes into efficient producers of desired chemicals. Read the full story.

+ Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health—and ours. Read the full story.

Continue Reading

Tech

The Download: sleeping in VR, and promising clean energy projects

Published

on

The Download: sleeping in VR, and promising clean energy projects


People are gathering in virtual spaces to relax, and even sleep, with their headsets on. VR sleep rooms are becoming popular among people who suffer from insomnia or loneliness, offering cozy enclaves where strangers can safely find relaxation and company—most of the time.

Each VR sleep room is created to induce calm. Some imitate beaches and campsites with bonfires, while others re-create hotel rooms or cabins. Soundtracks vary from relaxing beats to nature sounds to absolute silence, while lighting can range from neon disco balls to pitch-black darkness. 

The opportunity to sleep in groups can be particularly appealing to isolated or lonely people who want to feel less alone, and safe enough to fall asleep. The trouble is, what if the experience doesn’t make you feel that way? Read the full story.

—Tanya Basu

Inside the conference where researchers are solving the clean-energy puzzle

There are plenty of tried-and-true solutions that can begin to address climate change right now: wind and solar power are being deployed at massive scales, electric vehicles are coming to the mainstream, and new technologies are helping companies make even fossil-fuel production less polluting. 

But as we knock out the easy climate wins, we’ll also need to get creative to tackle harder-to-solve sectors and reach net-zero emissions. 

Continue Reading

Tech

Inside the conference where researchers are solving the clean-energy puzzle

Published

on

Inside the conference where researchers are solving the clean-energy puzzle


The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) funds high-risk, high-reward energy research projects, and each year the agency hosts a summit where funding recipients and other researchers and companies in energy can gather to talk about what’s new in the field.

As I listened to presentations, met with researchers, and—especially—wandered around the showcase, I often had a vague feeling of whiplash. Standing at one booth trying to wrap my head around how we might measure carbon stored by plants, I would look over and see another group focused on making nuclear fusion a more practical way to power the world. 

There are plenty of tried-and-true solutions that can begin to address climate change right now: wind and solar power are being deployed at massive scales, electric vehicles are coming to the mainstream, and new technologies are helping companies make even fossil-fuel production less polluting. But as we knock out the easy wins, we’ll also need to get creative to tackle harder-to-solve sectors and reach net-zero emissions. Here are a few intriguing projects from the ARPA-E showcase that caught my eye.

Vaporized rocks

“I heard you have rocks here!” I exclaimed as I approached the Quaise Energy station. 

Quaise’s booth featured a screen flashing through some fast facts and demonstration videos. And sure enough, laid out on the table were two slabs of rock. They looked a bit worse for wear, each sporting a hole about the size of a quarter in the middle, singed around the edges. 

These rocks earned their scorch marks in service of a big goal: making geothermal power possible anywhere. Today, the high temperatures needed to generate electricity using heat from the Earth are only accessible close to the surface in certain places on the planet, like Iceland or the western US. 

Geothermal power could in theory be deployed anywhere, if we could drill deep enough. Getting there won’t be easy, though, and could require drilling 20 kilometers (12 miles) beneath the surface. That’s deeper than any oil and gas drilling done today. 

Rather than grinding through layers of granite with conventional drilling technology, Quaise plans to get through the more obstinate parts of the Earth’s crust by using high-powered millimeter waves to vaporize rock. (It’s sort of like lasers, but not quite.)

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2021 Seminole Press.