DontFlush.Me

Last weekend, I participated in NYC’s first ever ECOHACK - a room full of well-intentioned geeks that come together to try to integrate environmental data and effect change thru knowledge generation.  It was so much fun.

Besides eating a delicious vietnamese sandwich, I was completely charmed by the incredible and generous atmosphere of cooperation, the diversity of skills and talents, and the innovative spirit.  There were many interesting projects and I chose DontFlush.Me (Information on NYC sewage outflows in this blog come from discussions w Leif Percifield and Liz Barry at the Ecohack event).  Together, our group of almost all strangers, created a web presence to assess how a NY-er can be alerted to minimize their water-use during storm events to help reduce the 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water that enters NYC waters annually. In brief, 70% of the NYC sewage system combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. So when NYC has 1/10 inch rain in an hour or 4/10 inch rain in 24 hours, the sewage system gets overloaded and raw sewage is released into NYC waterways.  The objective of our Hack, was to have a user input their home address and be notified when rainfall in their ‘sewage collection shed’ was likely to overload the system and release raw sewage.  That a water user could modify their behavior for a 24 hour period until the storm water passed.  While problematic in many ways in its current state, it is a wonderful first draft.