Sybil Derrible
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
I mean, it is amazing for tall buildings, but it's more amazing for entire cities, right? Which is what we do with, again, with Chicago, 12 pumps for all of Chicago. Now for a tall building, what happens is that you also have a pump in the bottom. So usually when you have a pump for an entire city, you want to have enough pressure. The pressure in the system is dictated by the fire department.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
they want to make sure that when they connect their fire hose to the hydrant, they can put out a fire. And so that's why usually that pressure is about enough for that water to go up to a five or six-story building. So that's why five or six-story buildings usually don't have a pump in the basement, but tall buildings do.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
You have two options, right? One is you look elsewhere, you see what they're doing and you reproduce something similar. And your second option is you see what you have and you try to do the best with what you have. So in the case of telecommunication, one of the things they did is, well, we like fiber optic cables, so we have to lay fiber optic cables there.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And so they went to, in New York, for example, I think they went to a lot of the old Western Union pipes that were there for some cables, and they just replaced all the cables with fiber optics. But usually it's one of those things, you know, where...
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
It's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris because they will have a different system partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves and partly based on when the systems were built because things evolve.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Well, you'd assume that that would be the obvious thing that you do, right? But in my experience, usually they don't do that too much just because things evolve so fast. So especially I talk with a lot of people in the transit industry. And when you look at how they handle a system in New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, often it's going to be pretty different.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So again, you would assume that they get together and that there's a one common system for everywhere, but often it's not the case. Water is another good example because the way that you treat your water really depends on your quality of the raw water that you get. And so there's no way you can have the same system in New York as in Chicago because the quality of the raw water is different.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Wastewater is my favorite infrastructure of all. By training, I'm more of a transportation person, but wastewater is what I prefer because it's incredibly complicated because you don't have one wastewater, you have two. There's the wastewater that we think of, which is the toilet, the showers, whatever we do at home. But there's also the wastewater coming from the rain.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So that's called the stormwater. And so in older cities, you tend to have combined sewer systems. So you have one single pipe in the middle of the road that has to handle the sanitary sewers from people and the stormwater from the rain. And in newer cities, they tend to be separate. And so depending on the type of system, you'll have different strategies.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
But usually what you want when you have a separate system is to treat the water that comes from homes, and you don't really treat the water that comes from the storm. But in systems, in cities with the combined sewer, then you treat everything.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And so that's where you have to go to a wastewater treatment plant, you treat all the water that's coming in, and then you put it back into the environment in usually a way that's clean enough where it will not harm anyone or the species or animals downstream, but not clean enough that you can drink readily out of it.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So that's a great question. So the first thing you do is you're going to try to separate some of the solids. So again, screens. Sometimes you might have, again, branches, water bottles, toilet paper all you have. You try to screen everything that you can physically out of it. Then you put some chemicals to favor something called flocculation. So you have all those particles that are there.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Those particles tend to be negatively charged. So essentially, no matter how long you let it sit there, they're like little magnets that just expel one another. So it's never really going to sit to the bottom of a tank. And so you put some chemicals to neutralize that negative charge, and then you just let gravity do its job.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And so that means all those little flocks are going to settle at the bottom of the basin, and then all the greases are going to float at the top. So you skim all those greases from the top, you remove everything from the bottom, and then you're left with clear water, but it's still not good water because it's got a lot of diluted stuff, you know, nasty stuff.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
but also detergents and soap and everything. And so then what you do after that is you leverage nature. And by that, I mean that all that disgusting stuff that I just talked about is actually amazing food for microbes. So then you use biofilters and as the water just goes down the biofilters, all those microbes feed on all that stuff.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And then after that, then you tend to have some pretty clear water and you can put some ozone or you can use some UV light to kill whatever is left there. And then you really see it to the environment. And what does that mean?
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
In the sea, in the river, usually a river, you know. That's why you tend to have water treatment plants upstream of a river and then wastewater treatment plants downstream of a river. One of the things I love to tell people when they fly is when you fly, when you take on a border plane and you start to ascend, look at what's out there. And very often you'll see a wastewater treatment plant.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
You'll see huge circles with water. You don't really know what it is, but it's a wastewater treatment plant. And the reason why you see that is because airports tend to be built wherever there was space. And that used to be normally in like low marshland or in a place that used to flood a lot. And that's usually downstream of a river.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And so that's why you have the wastewater treatment plant there and the airport just next door.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Well, then there's different treatments for that. It's called the sludge. And so usually you try to dry it, and then it ends up in a landfill with the waste that you throw as well, your garbage. So it just goes to a landfill, yeah.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
I mean, every city is different. The older a city, the more infrastructure you'll have there. The funny thing about cities is that, at least for the ones that really expanded in 1950s and 60s, we don't even know what's out there. You can ask your electric utility or sometimes the sewer systems.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
They don't really know what's out there because a lot of it was built in 1950s and 60s, and they didn't keep detailed record about that. That's the funny bit. So often, you know, that's why you hear stories of, oh, we've started digging and then we, you know, found this and we didn't expect that.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And so something that was supposed to take two weeks actually takes two or three months just because, yeah, we don't necessarily know everything that's down there.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Exactly. So natural gas naturally is odorless. So when you collect it, it's odorless. When they transmit it in those large gas lines, it's odorless. And then just when it arrives at the city, they add something called mercaptan that gives it its wonderful, beautiful rotten egg smell.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
They started to add that smell, I think it was in 1920s or 30s, when there was a big tragedy in Texas in a school where a lot of children died.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Oh, there's always a plan, right? There's always a plan for transportation. If there's one thing that people need is to be able to go from places to places. I mean, there's very few infrastructure systems as important as transportation for the economy. As people can go as far as possible, as fast as possible, it's probably one of the leading factors for the economy. So there's always a plan.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
always i know one of your areas of expertise or that you're working on right now is depopulation can can you explain that depopulation means that your city is actually losing population all right so usually uh when you talk about infrastructure when you build infrastructure you always have a growth plan you're like okay now we have x number of people we assume that it's going to grow by one two three percent in the next you know few years um
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And at some point, the opposite happens. So a city actually starts to lose population, and then you might need new infrastructure, but it's hard to justify it because there's no growth. There's actually, you know, you're shrinking. And so you're left with a lot of infrastructure that's now oversized, often that's aging, and that needs to be in maintenance, but there's no resources for it.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And what cities are shrinking? There's many of them. I actually published an article last year, and you can look at all the cities in the U.S. that are shrinking. Most of them are small, right? Most of them, there's usually a lot of media attention to when large cities are shrinking, like Detroit, but most of them are smaller.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
A lot of people are going to the cities. The big cities. The big cities, yeah. And places like the US, pretty rich countries, usually the birth rate is pretty low. And so most of the publishing growth is coming from immigration. And when you have immigrants, usually they prefer to go to larger cities than smaller cities.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So the price really came down. It's actually in Israel, I think it's 80%, 70 or 80% of waters consumed in the country is coming from the sea. So it's absolutely possible. Before, we really tried many technologies and the one that works best right now is something called reverse osmosis. And so you really take, so you have a membrane
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
and it's very packed and it looks like it's impermeable like water can't get through but you have tiny pores but they're so small that only pure water can get through so you push that salt water you push it very very very hard against that membrane and then only the pure water gets through and you collect all that pure water
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
once you have it you don't distribute it yet because that pure water is good but doesn't have any minerals and humans need minerals so first you bond you you you put a bunch of rocks into that water so a lot of limestone to add minerals and then you distribute that water and you know you can consume it you can drink it in a city where there's all this infrastructure there's transportation and water and electric and gas and all that
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
That's the shift. That's the trillion-dollar question for this coming century. What happened in the 20th century is that they were very, very much siloed. For example, a good example is water, water treatment. You need a lot of electricity. You don't really care where it comes from. You just ask your electric utility company, give me that electricity and I'll pay you for it.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And the problem with that is that whenever something happens to electricity, then it affects the water and then it affects the people. And so it's so interdependent that now we're really trying, talking, figuring out how we can have those people talk with one another a lot more so that systems that are interdependent by nature are a lot stronger, a lot more resilient.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So that's a conversation that's happening now. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that's going to happen in this century in infrastructure.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
In the U.S., a lot of times you have the back alleys or you might have some of those cables are not underground. It might be overground. But usually in cities that have both underground, yeah, you'll keep water on one side and electricity on the other. But that's like physical, right? They're separated physically, but you still need a lot of water for electricity.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So the way that you generate electricity usually requires a lot of water. And you also need electricity to treat and distribute water. So they're interrelated. physically apart.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
yes yes but these are the smaller lines right so your mains are far away from your big electric distribution lines you know so your your large pipes are away from your large wires and then you have the smaller pipes crossing over but that's okay because if you have a leak it's not gonna you know impact it too much for the small pipes i see well that makes sense and where's the gas right down the middle
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
That's a good question. It depends on the cities, right? Cities are going to have different regulations. The other funny thing, by the way, is even when you dig there, so not only are they separated, but the types of gravel that surrounds them are different.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So for example, with electricity, they have a special type of gravel to make sure that the rocks are not sharp and they don't kind of dig in the wire. So you might have different regulations. So that's again, different cities have different regulations.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Absolutely. We know this infrastructure is aging. We know it will have to change. Either we do the same thing, right? So we just take away one pipe and you put another one, or you're rethinking how we do it in the first place. And my big thing with this book, at least, is let's get everyone to understand the engineering principles of how that works.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
And then we can have a honest discussion about that and think about the type of infrastructure that we want for the next 50 to 100 years. A lot of water pipes in the streets, a lot of them are 100 years old. So we're not talking about some decisions for five or ten years, right? We're talking about decisions that will have an impact on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So let's make sure that we have a common ground and all talk about it.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
My huge pet peeve is multifunctional infrastructure. So right now, when you build infrastructure, it does only one thing. But what if it could do multiple things? And one of my favorite examples is in Malaysia. So Malaysia, tropical climate, and it rains a lot. But also Kuala Lumpur is a big city and all big cities suffer from traffic congestion.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So what they've done there is they've got a massive tunnel for cars so that to ease the congestion a little bit. Except that when it rains, the cars are just, they all go away. They close the tunnel and they flood it with stormwater. And in this way, stormwater is stored in that big tunnel as opposed to going in streets or flooding the entire city.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
So that's one example where you have one infrastructure system that does two things, multifunctional infrastructure.
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Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
It's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris because they will have a different system partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves and partly based on when the systems were built because things evolve.