Homes that are located in rural areas use septic tanks to turn their wastewater into clean water that is safe to return to the environment. However, there are too many homes close together in urban or suburban areas for this to work, so their waster water travels through the sewer system to a wastewater treatment plant.

Ancient Roman sewers - the birth of a great idea

Although it is not a topic that most people spend much time thinking about, sewers are an essential part of city life. Without an effective way to remove wastewater from an area where many people live, the human waste will build up and lead to very unhealthy living conditions. This was understood as far back as ancient Rome. The Romans built a rudimentary sewer system which flushed waste into the closest river. Obviously, in today's world where wastewater contains many environmentally unfriendly chemicals and cities have many more people in them, flushing waste into a river is not a viable option, but in Ancient Rome it was a very effective way of removing waste from their cities.

Sewer treatment – a great idea made better

Like the Roman sewer system, most modern systems still use gravity to pull raw wastewater away from a city or town. Now, instead of polluting a river or other body of water, the raw sewage flows from the sewer into a sewer treatment plant. These sewer plants run the raw sewage through a series of filters and tanks. Then, whatever liquid is left is treated with chlorine to kill any remaining bacteria. Now the water is deemed safe to return to the environment. The solid waste is broken down by naturally occurring bacteria which turns it into sludge that is free of the dangerous bacteria that human waste contains. Once this is done, the remaining solids can be safely disposed of almost anywhere.

Sewer pumps give gravity a helping hand.

Although most sewer systems use gravity to do the bulk of the work of removing sewage from a populated area, a very large population or certain geographical features may make it so that the force of gravity is not sufficient to do the job. To solve this problem, sewer pumps were created. These pumps do exactly what you would think that they do, they manually remove wastewater. They can effectively carry wastewater over hills where gravity can not or remove a larger volume more quickly than gravity alone could do. These sewer pumps not only move the sewage, but in most cases the action of the pump itself helps to physically break down the solids in the wastewater.

Sewers are an absolutely necessary component of urban life. Without an effective way to remove raw sewage from an area, large cities could never exist. The build up of human waste would very quickly lead to the spread of deadly disease and the city would no longer be able to support itself. The proof of this are the health problems that arise after a hurricane or other disaster damages a city's sewer system. Bacterial infections and other illnesses begin to show up in the people living there within days.

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