Stopping Storms from Creating Dangerous Urban Geysers:
During intense rainstorms, residents of urban areas rely on stormwater sewers to keep streets and homes from flooding. But in some cases, air pockets in sewers combine with fast-moving water to produce waterspouts that can reach dozens of feet high and last for several minutes. These so-called storm geysers can flood the surrounding area, cause damage to nearby structures, injure bystanders, and compromise drainage pipes.
In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Sichuan University, Ningbo University, University of Alberta, and Hohai University developed a computational model of stormwater piping to study storm geysers. They used this model to understand why storm geysers form, what conditions tend to make them worse, and what city planners can do to prevent them from occurring.
Perhaps the biggest cause of storm geysers is poor city planning. With extreme weather events becoming more common due to climate change, cities can often find themselves unprepared for massive amounts of rain. Growing cities are especially vulnerable. Small cities have small drainage pipes, but new streets and neighborhoods result in added runoff, and those small pipes may not be able to handle the increased volume.
[...] The authors say the best cure for a storm geyser is bigger pipes.
"The most effective preventive measure for newly planned drainage pipelines is to increase the pipeline diameter and improve system design, which reduces the likelihood of full-flow conditions and eliminates storm geysers," said Zhang.
However, that advice is little help to cities with existing pipeline infrastructure. In these systems, the focus must be on minimizing the potential damage by reducing the height of the geysers, the volume of expelled water, or the resulting damage to the pipeline.
"Scholars have proposed prevention measures such as increasing the maintenance hole diameter, using expansion segments in maintenance holes, installing orifice plates, and adding structures to allow air release while preventing the outflow of water," said Zhang. "However, these measures often cannot achieve all of the aforementioned objectives simultaneously."
A picture from the journal paper showing an urban geyser.
Journal Reference:
Xin Li, Jianmin Zhang, David Z. Zhu, et al., Modeling geysers triggered by an air pocket migrating with running water in a pipeline, Physics of Fluids, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0138342
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 18, @05:11PM (1 child)
If you can predict where they are likely to happen, they could boost revenue from tourism in the area. Just give it a catchy name like Old Unfaithful and drape a thin piece of rope in front of it--you know, health and safety--and you're all set.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Funny) by istartedi on Tuesday April 18, @06:20PM
Driver: We're going to have to turn around. The street is flooded.
Passenger: No! We're going to miss Old Sewergusher. It only goes off in weather like this.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 18, @06:38PM (5 children)
Need better urban planning, and keep things as natural as can be: destroying a water absorbing wet-land is stupid when you could just plan around it. But more money can be made from destroying than from proper planning, i guess.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19, @01:50AM (4 children)
Technically an urban area can absorb water too. You could require most rooftop rainwater to be collected (e.g. into water tanks). The water could then be let out more slowly or used for purposes other than drinking etc.
If most buildings did this then there would be fewer and smaller flash floods and urban geysers.
Of course it'll cost more to do this. But flash floods cost a city money too.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/real-estate/ct-xpm-2013-04-23-ct-sun-0421-garden-morton-20130423-story.html [chicagotribune.com]
A 6 foot cube of water is about 1600 gallons. If each building stored 1600 gallons that should help as much as those trees if not more right? Definitely better than having the rain go to the roads, drains and sewers.
Of course there'd still be floods if you had one of those huge cyclones/storms unless you stored even more water e.g. you'd need a 30 metre cube to store the 60 inch rainfall from Harvey over an area that's 100m x 100m (20m cube for 30 inch rainfall). But I bet trees and wetlands wouldn't do that much better vs floods in such cases and you don't have to perfectly store all the water to reduce the total damage/impact.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 19, @01:52PM (2 children)
Another big aid would be using permeable asphalt, so that water can soak into the ground instead of flowing into the storm drains
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19, @02:39PM (1 child)
Bermuda's solution is very cool.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/03/how-bermudas-chronic-water-shortage.html [amusingplanet.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @09:25AM
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday April 19, @03:26PM
I like the idea of roof-top gardens. Green everywhere.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 18, @07:42PM
I was looking for an old news story where a huge sanitary sewer line coupling broke, creating a poo-water geyser under some guy's pickup truck, but the search reveals that this shit literally is happening all the time:
https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+force+main+sewer+rupture [google.com]
The problem in Miami is that poo flows downhill, but they ain't got no hills, so they have pump stations instead, and by the time you collect a million discharge lines into one, you've got a really big pipe with a lot of flow and pressure in it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end