Winter time in Alexandria! It’s the most wonderful time of the… Oops, until the city floods and your car is underwater!
It is becoming a normal thing each year now that we see Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt, drowning in the mud and water each time it rains. And it is becoming worse and worse each year and no one is taking any action towards this problem. Let’s see where this problem originates from.
Engineering Background
When any city is planned, it is a must that the engineers should first plan for it a water supplying pipes network, a sewage network and rain drainage network (also called storm water network). These underground pipe networks are made based on the size of the city and the expected number of inhabitants that would live there.
Alexandria
When Alexandria’s pipe networks were first made many years ago, they were perfectly planned. The city had a water network, a sewage network, and a rain drainage network that directs the rain water into the sea. Everything was going fine. Even the streets were designed with a slight slope towards the side that drains the water to the underground pipes. Everything was going according to plan and no one complained.
The New Neighborhoods
The problem first appeared when the city started expanding and the government starting building new neighborhoods, and as any new area, it needed the three networks to be built. Building a water network is easier than the other two so it was made, and instead of building new sewer and rain drainage pipe network, the engineers decided to do something else in order to save money.
The First Problem
The engineers decided to connect the new sewage and rain network to the old rain drainage network in order to save money, the networks were built based on that design. Of course, consequently the sea started to get polluted as the sewage and the human waste of a huge area is thrown in it. And as time went by, the pollution was getting more and more and it was hard to hide it anymore, so, the new engineers had to find another brilliant solution.
The Solution
As seems to be the trend, the cheapest choice is always the answer no matter what the quality is. Accordingly, a very cheap solution was made, which is to transfer both the networks into the old sewers network, a network that was designed for a much smaller area and way less population. Thus everything is now thrown into one network, the old and the new sewers and rain water, and of course the capacity of the pipes did not withstand the new huge amount of water it had to drain, so it started draining water slower than the incoming amount.
To help with that, the network was being cleaned regularly so that it wouldn’t be blocked, But as years went by, the networks stopped being cleaned, the number of people and their waste increased and the capacity of the system stayed the same. Consequently, the network was blocked, the rain water stopped being drained, and because the city roads were built slightly inclined towards the sea in the first place, the whole city became a huge sink with a blocked drain.
Updating the infrastructure networks is not an option. The city is being destroyed slowly, and when buildings are exposed to water for a long time without being isolated, they start to weaken. So if the case continues to be like this, if each time it rains the city will be a huge swimming pool, we will then have to deal with the buildings falling apart one by one until there is nothing left of Alexandria.
