Connecting Infrastructure To The Internet from the Dish
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
