SF Sewer Safety: Blog Purpose

Sewers have been used by humans for several thousand years. The original purpose was carry human waste away from our habitations. Over time, the goals and purposes of sewers evolved. Many human settlements and early urbanized areas started to include simple drainage of rainfall.

This is a collection of notes and observations about combined sewer safety issues in San Francisco. The target audience is San Francisco residents, regulators, the press and general public interested in drainage, etc. Much of this will be outline formats, short paragraphs and notes with hyperlinks to external or internal documents. 

The goal is to share information collected over the years, thoughts and observations on many aspects of combined sewer management, drainage, environmental and community impacts, and start to organize them for a more comprehensive set of documents to discuss various issues related to combined sewers and flooding, primarily focused on San Francisco. 

All documents have been downloaded from various web sites or obtained through public records act document requests. Attempts will be made to provide sources and references of documents however some have been collected over many years and specific source information may have been lost or forgotten. Notes will indicate sources of opinion where primary documents and other sources are generalized.

 Blog entries will be quick notes and brief discussions about topics such as:

1.  Combined Sewer Systems-General

2. San Francisco's combined sewer system

• History
• General current system configuration
  

3. History of flooding in SF

4. Current problems in SF sewer system: 

• flooding
• sea level rise
• combined sewage overflows
• management and governance

5. Current problems with the management of SF sewers, SF PUC and SF in general

6. Regulatory environment, regulations, permits, etc.

7. Legal notes: California drainage laws, legal environment

8. General notes about engineering, sewer/flooding/drainage engineering, hydraulic and hydrology modeling, weather forecasts, many other topics I've worked in over the years.

 Documents referenced come from public sources, either web resources or from California Public Records Act (PRA) or Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document requests, mostly obtained by San Francisco flooding victims such as Solutions Not Sandbags,  which is primarily homeowners in the Outer Mission (Cayuga) as well as Mission (Folsom, 17th sts), Ingleside, West Portal (Wawona), and Marina districts.

Note: this is a test of Google's Blogger (see this discussion of blogging platforms). I doubt I will use this long term but its a place to start. In this particular case, I'm testing this for sending notes and recommendations as well as start blog chapters on flooding issues in SF