Comment by seanmcdirmid
13 hours ago
Tokyo and much of Japan have huge expensive drainage systems to prevent their cities from flooding during the storms they have. China is in the same region and doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, so you’ll still see cities like Wuhan flood every few years. It’s a good bet that China will eventually invest in these systems like Japan has, as it matches their development model fairly well.
I’m not sure how Florida or Louisiana would deal with flooding though, they simply have nowhere for the water to go. They would have to basically pump and store it above ground somehow. It might make sense to re-level their cities with an artificial ground level a few stories above sea level.
The most impressive aspect of the Tokyo system is not the size (largest in the world), but the willingness to spend money on it. From start to finish it took less than 15 years. Chicago’s system, just as ambitious in size, is still going despite construction starting in the mid 1970s. Although to be fair, it is “complete” and operating but with reduced holding capacity: they are waiting for a handful of stone quarries away from the city to reach their end-of-life so they can dig the tunnels to them and use them for stormwater holding.
But the problem, now that these giant things exist, is that they aren’t the panacea they were thought to be. Large storms of today’s era are dumping too much water in too short an amount of time. You just can’t build big enough.