It's Draining To Think About

The last two days have seen a very strange weather pattern in this area. It goes a little something like this - the day starts out sunny and nice, maybe a touch on the muggy side. Then sometime in the late afternoon, without warning, the sky turns black and the heavens open as lightning starts flashing almost non-stop, with some of the lightning quite fierce. (This afternoon I could hear the thunder getting closer, so I started doing the trick of counting after the lighting to try and figure out how close the storm actually was. After one flash I only got to "On-" before thunder was shaking my house.) What is extra nice is that at no point the night before does the weatherman tell you any of this is coming. Anyway, as the rain was pouring down I checked the local Doppler channel to see just how much longer the storms were going to last. (The only good part is that for as strong as they were they were at least fast-moving.) While checking out the radar I also noticed there was a warning scrolling across the bottom. It warned that there was a flash-flood warning in place until further notice, giving me helpful tips like don't wade into a rapidly-moving water. Now, I could lament whether or not this was necessary since the only people who would be able to see this particular announcement would already be in their homes and there isn't much you could do in that situation. Or I could talk about whether warnings like that even matter in quick-moving storms like these. Or even if these warning only exist to keep the graphics guys busy between blizzard and hurricane seasons. Instead I wonder if they would even be necessary if people had designed drains to work a little better.

It feels like every single time there is a bad storm the sewer grates on the streets near my house get overrun with water and flood the nearby street. Believe me when I tell you some of these flooded areas can get very deep (at some point remind me to tell you the story of me and Franny in his sister's new car). During prolonged storms overrun drains can stay that way for days and wash out entire roadways. I just can't help but wonder why we still put up with this? The idea of  paving a street in such a way as to create a low area which serves as a collection spot for the water so the entire roadway doesn't end up under water starts out very smart, but when you aim all this water at one place and then put an inadequate drain at the bottom of that low area the idea stops looking quite so brilliant. If you suggested a system like that in any other circumstance you would be laughed out of the room, so the fact it has been allowed to stand when it comes to public roadways is rather staggering. I mean, shouldn't we have come up with a better system to drain water away from the roads so that this stops happening by now? I'm not asking for anything drastic either - just better. And I think that if we are going to look at fixing this problem the first place we should look at are the drains.

Obviously I am not a civil engineer, but it does seem like we stopped working on better drainage grates about 100 years ago. I'm all for quitting while you are ahead and not wasting time trying to improve on perfection but since they started using this style I don't even know if we tried anything other than making the grates small enough so that little kids couldn't fall through them anymore. Are we really supposed to believe we got the first generation right the first time and then quit, yet we've been making toothbrushes more complicated every year since the 1970s? Human nature compels us to try and fix that which is not really broken and I would think a product like this which actually would help a lot of people would get more attention (plus, it would be a government contract and those are where the money is). It just seems that since the job of these grates is to get water off the street and instead they are actually creating spots where it floods they aren't doing their job very well and could probably stand to have someone take a crack at making them work a little better. And it's not just the sewer drains which have an issue. My gutters apparently don't like it when it rains too much too fast because they also clogged during these storms and caused water to pour over the sides, which is insane when you think about it because getting rain away from your foundation is the only reason you put gutters on your house in the first place.

I completely understand it when a product fails to perform under an extreme circumstance it was never designed to endure. After all, only a jerk would complain that his toaster stopped working after he dropped it in the ocean. I simply don't feel like a severe rainstorm is an extreme circumstance, especially for products which were designed around the concept of dealing with rain. I mean, isn't the whole point of product testing to make sure what you are selling will hold up and give the consumers their money's worth? Have the people who designed a gutter never seen an infomercial? Heck, they should see some of the crazy stuff they do to cars to make sure they will start even in usual circumstances, so why wouldn't products like drains and gutters have the same standards? In all honestly it doesn't even seem like it would be that hard to create a test lab - just turn many hoses on at the same time and watch what happens. When it gets to the moment where the gutter can no longer handle all the water, that is when you should go back and keep working on the design. I know the basic laws of physics aren't going to allow you to make many extreme changes, but after two days of minor flooding for storms that shouldn't have been this big of a problem it feels like any modifications would be a welcome improvement.