13 Jul Washing all our clothes to clean a single dirty sock

How storm water complicates municipal sewage treatment by frequently overwhelming treatment plants, why this is such a hard problem to fix in older cities like Sydney and Halifax, and what property owners can do to help, all in one cute video courtesy of Halifax Diverse, the Sierra Club, Halifax Water, and (Bousquet-bait warning) TD Green Streets:

For more information on the exponential cost of designs that anticipate rare environmental events, see the 100-year flood. For a real life example, Coke Ovens Brook in Sydney, Nova Scotia, has vast sloped sides, lined with heavy plastic and armoured with stone, all to convey what is usually a tiny trickle of water at the very bottom of its comically deep stream bed. But the brook always ready to handle the runoff from a one-in-100-year rainfall, and keep it from soaking into the capped and contained industrial waste below the land surrounding the brook.

[Hat tip: Richard Stephenson.]