On the Grid A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make our World Work
Wires, pipes, roads, and water support the lives we lead, but the average person doesn't know where they go or even how they work. Our systems of infrastructure are not only shrouded in mystery, many are woefully out of date. In On the Grid, Scott Huler takes the time to understand the systems that sustain our way of life, starting from his own quarter of an acre in North Carolina and traveling as far as Ancient Rome.
The atmospheric tour through the sewer pipes is an infrastructure staple, though mostly imaginary: in modern cities, where instead of a combined system carrying both stormwater and a separate system of pipes carries wastewater, the sewer pipes are both small and much less pleasant than the enormous caverns of cities with combined systems, like New York and London.
Just the same, Undercity.org provides some of the greatest pictures around from journeys to the great caverns beneath those cities: http://www.undercity.org/
If you want to see what an average sewer looks like from the inside, though – and with a great soundtrack, no less -- try this:
In 2009 the "Raleigh sewer monster" episode gave a tiny colony of tubifex worms growing in a sewer pipe beneath a Raleigh shopping center into an extremely brief stint as an Internet star. Here it is in all its glory:
But for the best, most thorough, and most consistently entertaining site about sewers on the entire Internet, you want to visit www.sewerhistory.com
