The city's antiquated sewers won't be saved by civic duty and Adopt-a-Drain — only major investments.
. The feel-good PR campaign obfuscates a grimmer reality, though. San Francisco’s antiquated stormwater system is prone to flooding, particularly in low-lying areas, and specifically flooding that contains raw sewage. The problem will only get worse in the face of storms enhanced by climate change. Which makes Adopt-a-Drain the paper straw of flood management, a gesture that's as lovely as it is inadequate.
There are fixes that could make the city less flood-prone, though. Significant repairs and upgrades to the sewer system would keep water flowing even when there’s a huge influx. And investments in strategies like rain gardens and other so-called"green infrastructure" could keep runoff from entering the sewers in the first place.San Francisco is one of the oldest cities on the West Coast, so it has an old-school sewage system.
Even accounting for the “adoptions," there’s still an enormous gap — tens of thousands of catch basins — that aren’t being examined or cleaned on a regular basis. When asked about the disparity, utilities commission spokesperson Joseph Sweiss told SFGATE that many of the untended catch basins don’t require regular check-ups. Instead, cleaning crews focus their attention on priority areas and 311 complaints about clogging.
“The Public Utilities Commission has given us the runaround time and time again, it took the state to step in to solve an issue that has been ongoing for decades,” Lisa Dunseth, an advocate for the organization Solutions Not Sandbags, told KQED last year. To date, the utilities commission has spent $64 million on “green infrastructure,” including grants to fund the construction of permeable pavement and rain gardens, which collect and soak up rainwater. Sweiss wrote to SFGATE that the utilities commission views green infrastructure as “an additional, complementary measure for flooding mitigation in that it decreases the volume of stormwater directed to the system.
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