I kayak and fish in the bays of NYC. A fact not known by much of the population of the city is that almost every time it rains, the sewage treatment plants release raw sewage into the ocean. This is due to the storm drains being drained by the same system that sewage is treated from. Due to this the water is filled with trash, floating condoms, and wet wipes. So this isn't just third world countries. It is bad enough that bacteria and nitrogen wastes get into the water when this happens. They should at least capture the trash and disgusting sewage products.
Not just older cities. I live in San Diego and we have exactly the same problem here. Can't swim or surf after the rain. Not exactly sure why it was done this way - maybe because it rains very rarely and they just did not design the sewage system to handle rare (but sometimes heavy) rains.
California built a ton of great infrastructure and then people decided they didn’t want to pay to maintain it. The entire state is full of projects where the people who ran them are begging for money to avoid needing to spend even more after it finally breaks. One of the big problems was the sprawl due to the highway system – when San Diego raises its property taxes that means people may still work and play in the city but will buy a house somewhere else, paying no taxes at all.
This is a common story around the world but Prop 13 adds the wrinkle that it mostly affects new buyers and people who haven’t figured out how to pass property to their descendants without resetting the tax assessment. That guy who bought a place in PB with his back pay when he got out of the Navy is still paying $100 a year in taxes. He has a massive incentive not to do anything which will reset that, so the city won’t be getting more revenue that way until he (or his heirs) sell the place.
Yup. I had to explain this to my visiting friends, who wanted to go to Coney Island after a storm.
IIRC, there are physical limitations on the city's ability to filter sewage and stormwater -- it all runs through the same pipes, and it would be a momentous undertaking to split the systems (some of those pipes are 200+ years old, and aren't accurately mapped). Wastewater treatment capacity is slowly increasing, however.
