The story goes that after heavy rain all our sewage and stormwater overflows into our beaches and rivers.
But that makes me think, wouldn’t it be possible to stop this from happening with enough money and manpower or it is just simply not possible due to runoff from nature?
In: Planetary Science
That depends how the sewer system is set up. Where I live, the storm drains and sewer systems are separate, so when rain overwhelms the system, they don’t need to release raw sewage into the rivers. In places where the sewers and storm drains are combined, if the storms overwhelm the system, the only way to prevent sewage backup in houses is to pump the raw sewage and runoff directly into the waterways. IIRC practical engineering did a good video on this.
Yes it is possible and it is done in many places of the world. We get heavy rains all the time and our beaches are never polluted with sewage.
You can build sewer system in a way that it can hold the worst possible rain/storm + 500% of this just to be sure.
BUT this will be very very expensive not only to build but also to maintain. As most of such a system would run dry with normal weather.
I know for example that the sewer system in some German cities needs to be flushed with fresh water regularly because “we Germans” use too little water.
But yet it will sometimes overflow if there is a really heavy storm with rain that normally falls down within a whole month.
We could for sure make the sewer even bigger but then we would probably need to flush it constantly with fresh water to keep it working at all.
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