Public Utilities/Services

[kalos72]

As my players and I talk about their plans to rebuild the NYC area one point keeps popping up as the major roadblock. Forgetting about food or electricity or marauders...

Fresh water and sewage treatment...without both any major population center is just a cesspool waiting for outbreaks.

The players are thinking public restrooms and water points...

My biggest problem is just not understanding how the modern system works honestly. How DOES a major city gets its water delivered? OR what does happen to the waste once I flush the toilet?

[mikeo80]

Originally Posted by kalos72

As my players and I talk about their plans to rebuild the NYC area one point keeps popping up as the major roadblock. Forgetting about food or electricity or marauders...

Fresh water and sewage treatment...without both any major population center is just a cesspool waiting for outbreaks.

The players are thinking public restrooms and water points...

My biggest problem is just not understanding how the modern system works honestly. How DOES a major city gets its water delivered? OR what does happen to the waste once I flush the toilet?

While I am not an engineer, my understanding of municipal water system goes like this...

Most East Coast USA cities get their water from major river systems. Or they pipe the water from remote lakes formed by dams. The water flows into water treatment centers where it is chlorinated and florine is added. In some local system the water is also treated with ammonia. It is here in Fayetteville, NC. THe water is tested for certain pathogens and carcinogens, and pumped to various water towers for storage and use. Gravity provides most of the water pressure. It is piped to the end user.

Once you shower, or use the commode, or other wise send water down the drain, another set of pipes carries the water to a sewage treatment center. This place removes solid wastes, chlorine and other chemicals are used to re purify the water, and the water is released back into the natural water sources.

You are correct that in a catastophe, without clean water and a sewage disposal service, your city can become a DEATH trap quickly. Most of the death in cities up to the 20th century was caused by cholera and other nasty digestive track diseases.

Hope this helps

Mike

[Legbreaker]

You could of course go back to 17th century systems - ie basically none.
Or, jump forward to the 19th Century (even early to mid 20th in some areas) and sewerage was collected in buckets daily from outdoor toilets. A shitty job, but somebody had to do it.

[HorseSoldier]

In theory you'd have legacy infrastructure left on scene from before the nukes and all, but how intact and functional it would be would vary from place to place. At least in some places, there may be the capability to restore 20th century amenities to local areas, at least to some extent, or at least piggy back more modest fixes on existing systems.

For the more typically torn up area, I would think that your players are on the right track for an effective approach with the idea of potable water points. In T2K NYC you're going to have radically reduced population levels, generally speaking, so I'd worry less about current human contamination of water supplies as the major issue (though that could be an issue where ever people are packed in without adequate sanitation) and more about pre-war pollution. Flowing water supplies in the NYC area right now aren't really noted for their potability, and with urban unrest, a couple winters of wear and tear without human maintenance, and such there's no telling what's leaking into the rivers flowing around Manhattan.

From a gaming perspective, this is one of those issues where I'd have some sort of NPC who knew the ins and outs of plumbing projects and have him just present some options or findings to players rather than trying to nuts and bolts it.

[Webstral]

Mike's summary is a pretty good one. I have only a couple of supplementary items.

Big cities tend to have their water delivered via aqueduct. Some of these are open, while others are closed. A few cities survive on ground water. NYC gets its water from up-state.

How wastewater is handled depends a great deal on the municipality. NYC in 1997 had secondary treatment at the very minimum because there are too many people in too small an area to get away with less. Secondary treatment means that after the solids are separated out the wastewater moves to bacterial mats. The stuff that passes through the screens (the excrement) moves through what amounts to huge tanks of excrement-gobbling bacteria. The microbes do most of the work that needs to be done by removing the materials cholera and other infectious microorganisms live on. Some places do tertiary, which is either chemical (chlorine, typically) or radiation (ultraviolet light does the trick). I don't know if NYC had tertiary treatment in 1997.

It's very hard to imagine that PCs could run something like this. Leg is right about the alternatives. Until surprisingly recently, there were night soil collectors in some parts of Tokyo; i.e., dudes collected nasty buckets. There's nothing wrong with outhouses in a place like Manhattan in 2000, provided they are managed corrrectly. The locals probably have figured this one out by 2000.

Webstral

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Webstral

Big cities tend to have their water delivered via aqueduct. Some of these are open, while others are closed. A few cities survive on ground water. NYC gets its water from up-state.

Just one thing to add here; I can't remember the name of the aqueduct, but NYC's primary aqueduct from upstate is in very BAD condition, even today. They don't even know how to fix it; they can't even reduce the water flow through it due to water demands and because even reducing the water flow stands a good chance of causing the aqueduct to collapse. Even sending a robot down the aqueduct to survey it is considered impossible right now; the flow is very turbulent and the robot might actually damage the aqueduct. In T2K, neglect might have caused that aqueduct to collapse, or the lack of water flowing from it (due to large amounts of taps turned off and toilets not flushing) may have caused it to rupture.

[Legbreaker]

There's likely to be plenty of sanitation engineers, plumbers, construction workers, etc who all know more than the PCs. Let them handle the details and have the PCs simply issue the order "fix it!"

[Targan]

I recently watched a 2009 documentary film titled GasLand which talked a bit about NYC's water supply. I highly recommend the documentary (more for its main focus on groundwater contamination caused by the natural gas industry's hydraulic fracturing practices than anything else) but if you can get hold of it it does talk a bit about the NYC area's water catchment.

In my opinion rainwater tanks would be the best way of providing fresh water to organised communities in NYC. Water from the rivers and from the reservoirs in Central Park would be too contaminated for long term safe drinking I think (contaminated both by fallout and by chemicals). I guess sewage would be dealt with in a way such as Leg described, or eventually perhaps channelled/pumped into the Hudson or East Rivers.

Kalos, when you say your players have "plans to rebuild the NYC area" do you mean rebuild control and the rule of law, or do you mean actual physical rebuilding of infrastructure? The latter would be waaaaaay beyond the abilities of a PC group I would have thought. You'd be looking at years and huge amounts of manpower just to get existing legacy infrastructure back up and running let alone real rebuilding of physical infrastructure. I know it is only a game but I think what you are suggesting is more like a high fantasy RPG than the gritty realism of the T2K I am more familiar with. In any case why would they bother? You'd be better off getting small to medium sized towns with surrounding farmland up and running again. An urban metropolis like NYC is a product of a highly industrialised, highly specialised society. In the T2K world all NYC is good for, really, is as a huge pile of salvageable materials.