The Ugly Side of Floods

Our current climate situation can be best described visually as a series of extremes across a spectrum of hot, cold, wet, dry, or windy weather. These days, if you’re seeing one region engulfed in hot weather in the form of wildfires and droughts, you’re likely to find another region entrenched in downpours and hurricanes or another stricken by blizzards. This is pretty much a point that bears repeating since our current pace of rectifying the situations is still mostly left unchecked or disregarded.

Climate change can upend a functioning community — in both a figurative and literal sense. In a battle between the forces of nature versus human infrastructure, the former usually has the upper hand since most infrastructures grow antiquated over time, making them vulnerable to stronger or newer threats such as the worsening implications of climate change. In this piece, we’ll narrow down to one area where a chink in the infrastructure’s armor allows climate change to gush forth a monster of our own making against us: the sewage system.

Buried under the typical and idyllic urban community, the common sewage system is a complex network of pipes that uses gravity to direct the flow of waste and water from residential households and buildings to a treatment plant where it is filtered and “cleaned,” sending the runoff water to bodies such as streams, rivers or the ocean. At the same…