A long time ago, practically in another life, I almost became an engineer.
That is, I had a scholarship offer to Drexel in Philadelphia to join their engineering program. Instead I went to a different university and got a different degree.
But I still look at how things are engineered, and I often ask why things are done the way they are done.
In the town Destiny Image is located, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, many of the storm drains are labelled “DRAINS TO SUSQUEHANNA”. For those not “in the know” (or who don’t want to bother looking it up on Google Maps, Mapquest, Google Earth, Terraserver, or anywhere esle) the Susquehanna River is about 45 miles east of Shippensburg.
Now, I don’t know how ordinary it is for cities and towns to pipe their storm water runoff to other places, but to me, this seems like a great waste. It seems like every other year Pennsylvania isn’t getting quite as much rainfall as we’d like, and the water table is getting low. At Destiny Image a few years ago we had to drop the geothermal pumps a few dozen more feet because of this.
To my mind, wouldn’t it make sense to run rain runoff in cities and towns into the ground so they can feed into the groundwater supply? In general, groundwater has already been filtered by the hundred or so feet of dirt and rock it has to get through, and when it’s forced back out through natural springs it’s the cleanest, most refreshing water there is. And allowing it to run into the water table helps to raise the level of the water table which helps farmers and rural citizens who depend on wells.
I’m thinking that things like draining rain runoff 50 miles (or more) to a major river (which feeds almost directly to the ocean) sounds a lot like a public works program developed to give someone’s nephew a job.
Am I wrong? Is there really a good reason for it?
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