I noticed somthing while watching a movie (well, really, A TV show on DVD). Sewers. They are always portrayed as fairly roomy, well lite labyrinths. Now I have no idea on sewer layouts in real life, but mnovies and TV make it seem like theres this huge city under a city. Sure its got to be stinky and all that, but do vast sewers like this really exist? I mean like you could literally live there (if you didn’t mind the smell and crap like Darkman or something? Could you really have a sewer ociety unbenkownst to the surface world?
Very large diameter sewers do exist, yes. I suppose you might be able to live in some of the abandoned ones.
Sewers in real life are like this: The line running out of your house is relatively small, 4" or so. It taps into the main line, which is usually running parallel to the street, either in the right-of-way or under the pavement. This line is a 6" or 8" diameter pipe.
The network of sewer mains in your neighborhood is going to connect to a bigger interceptor line which probably follows the path of the nearest creek. That’s because following the stream valley is a good way to use gravity to make your gray water flow to the treatment plant.
As you get closer to the treatment plant, the lines get bigger and bigger. That’s where these huge tunnels in the movies come from.
The size of the largest tunnel is dictated by the number of customers served; also the number and types of industry served.
ETA: Forgot a couple of things. Another thing about sewers is, by the time you get into the 36" to 48" size, the water is running in them constantly, due to the large area served. That’s something that bothers me about some of these movie type scenarios - you would expect those 96" and up interceptors to be flowing at least half full if not more. So I’m dubious about walking thru them.
Also I remember some debate about the UL that there are underground communities living in old abandoned subway and sewer tunnels. Seems hard to substantiate.
The really large ones can also be storm drains, They do not always have water running in them, but you can die quite easily if you squat in them as waterflow gets very nasty in the right amount of runoff.
Near where I grew up there were some storm drains that were downright roomy, and not at all stinky. Just like the movie sewers they usually had a tiny amount of runoff water going through them, barely a trickle. They weren’t very maze-like though.
Kids often play in storm drains, then sometimes drown when it rains because they fill up very quickly.
There are some HUGE sewers under Berlin. Hitler wanted to make a grand complex with all kinds of fancy buildings and parade grounds and such, and he didn’t want cars mucking it up, so he started to build underground tunnels for the cars. He didn’t get all that far with his plan, but there are easily some very big places there where people could live undetected (although occasionally people do go in and inspect the tunnels).
There are also lots of bunkers and tunnels left over from the war.
http://www.disinfo.com/2009/11/hitlers-hidden-underground-city-found-in-berlin-video/
There’s a bunch of stuff under Seattle too. What used to be ground level is now underground due to Seattle basically raising up the street level. People could have easily lived there in the past, though these days it is now becoming a tourist attraction.
It’s been about twenty+ years since I read it, so forgive me if I’m mistaken about every single thing about this–but Hugo devotes quote a lot of space in *Les Misérables *to describing the sewers of Paris in fairly meticulous detail. Similar to his exacting depictions of Paris and the Cathedral in Hunchback. There was a lot of running and whatnot in the sewers, but I can’t say if his detail stemmed from research or imagination. Anyone?
I think Mike Rowe is in the sewers on at least one episode of “Dirty Jobs.” Come to think of it: the opening montage, where the rat jumps? I think that’s in a sewer.
(“Well it’s a dirty, dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it …”)
TVTropes.org has a page for this, of course: Absurdly Spacious Sewer.
There are huge sewers in Paris and in London, and indeed, in many older cities.
The largest sewers are “combined” sewers, which were built to handle both sanitary waste and stormwater flow. These were typically built back in the days when sanitary waste was flushed untreated to the nearest river.
Eventually, people began to object to raw sewage being dumped into rivers, and the sewers were redirected to treatment plants. However, plants have a limited treatment capacity (can only handle n thousand or million gallons per day), so when rainfalls tax the pipe or plant capacity, oftentimes the overflow is still spilled raw into rivers and other water bodies.
The EPA tends to frown on this, so most large old cities in the US are working to disconnect their combined sewers from their sanitary sewers. Newer cities just construct their stormwater sewers separate from their sanitary sewers.
During the “Sewer Rats” scene in Les Mis, the lighting implies that lamplight or moonlight is shining through the sewer grates from above. This would definitely have been a combined sewer, since it was open to receive rain. (Also that was really the only type of sewer built at that time.)