How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sponge
San Francisco has a similar problem to the one described in Pittsburg.  We use an old, single pipe, gravity based system that carries both storm water and sewage.  When it rains heavily, the system backs up at various bottlenecks. Unfortunately, some of these are in heavily populated and residential areas, which get flooded with human waste.  Even areas not at the bottlenecks may see more mild drainage backups.<p>Sadly, SF has done a pretty bad job managing this:<p><a href="http://www.sfweekly.com/news/shit-storm-why-wont-sf-stop-flooding-homes-with-sewage/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfweekly.com/news/shit-storm-why-wont-sf-stop-flo...</a><p>SF's esponse to this problem has shaken my confidence in the city's governance.  SF is going in the opposite direction from what is suggested in this article - we are paving over (with non-permeable surfacing) more than ever.  The common practice of paving over your front year for extra parking is generally illegal, but like most quality of life issues in SF, enforcement is so rare that the city created an entitlement - and it has become the norm in some neighborhoods.<p>I know some people my chuckle that this particular issue would cause me to question SF's government, considering what is going on.  But I think it's the straightforward nature of this - the clear engineering failure, the cause and effect between excessive paving and storm system overflow, the unenforced legislation to curtail it, the massive city budget and projects without adequate funding for critical infrastructure... it's the mundane failures that really drive home how badly SF's government is handling serious problems.