How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sponge

Re:How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sp... by Retric on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @08:43AM (#15860960)

I suspect it's cheaper to simply build a large enough drainage system initially. This is useful if you have already failed and are trying to cope with failure.

Still, many people are pushing it because you get more plants not because it's cost effective.

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Re:How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sp... by galobtter on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @09:09AM (#15861118)

Like the other guy pointed out, there isn't always an area to drain too. Also I'd say having more plants has other benefits, and so does draining water into the ground, which would lead to more ground water edit: and into an aquifer (like wanderr pointed out) instead of wasted into an ocean

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Re:How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sp... by mnw21cam on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @08:53AM (#15861023)

It depends if you have somewhere benign to drain all the water into. If there is a population downstream that might get annoyed if you dump lots of run-off on them, then making your land more sponge-like can be really useful. If "downstream" is the ocean a mile away, not so much.

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Re:How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sp... by wanderr on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @09:09AM (#15861113)

There is also potentially a lot of benefit to having the water enter the soil and eventually make its way down into the aquifer instead of just shunting it "away".

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Re:How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sp... by 24gttghh on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @09:07AM (#15861100)

There are certain ways of building swales[0] in an urban environment that can help absorb or slow the leeching of nasty chemicals in runoff into groundwater or communities downstream.

[0]http://nwrm.eu/measure/swales

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