EPA estimates 75,000 US sewage spills occur each year
A team of engineers and professors in Europe is developing a $9 million EU-funded robotics project called PIPEON to detect and potentially address sewer pipe problems before disaster strikes, according to a Wall Street Journal video report published October 15.
The Wall Street Journal’s report frames the effort as tackling what it calls “the dark and perilous world beneath our streets.” The piece opens with the January collapse of a sewer pipe outside Washington, D.C., that spilled more than 240 million gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River. The paper describes the Potomac release as likely the largest sewage spill in U.S. history.
That single spill was one of an estimated 75,000 sewage spills that occur across the country each year, according to the EPA, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The PIPEON project comes as aging sewer networks struggle with growing populations and changing weather patterns, the Wall Street Journal reports. The European team is designing the robot to detect and potentially address problems before disaster strikes.
The video piece was produced by George Downs, a Wall Street Journal video correspondent based in London covering the future of transport and mobility, and Conor Finnegan, a video journalist covering international news at the Journal’s London bureau. Finnegan joined the paper from ABC News, where he was based in Mexico City; he previously spent a decade in Washington, including five years covering the State Department.