Engineers can now link a building's rainwater catchment system to weather predictions from the Internet. Alerted city services can then empty water storage basins so that stormwater doesn't flood our sewers:
It may sound like a trivial problem, but the EPA estimates that the U.S. has $13 billion invested in wastewater infrastructure alone. More importantly, the majority of America's largest cities--more than 700 in all--dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains, because their sewer and stormwater systems were designed a century ago. ...
Giving building planners the assurance that they'll always have access to a free water supply means they can actually use it. And putting these on enough buildings could go a long way to solving the problem of combined sewer and stormwater systems being overwhelmed when it rains.
(Photo: Residents try to unblock a sewage grate to free floodwater on Coney Island after Hurricane Irene hit New York, August 28, 2011. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/12/connecting-infrastructure-to-the-internet.html
