Billions Beneath the Streets
Six Cities and the Unresolved Fight Over Sewer Overflows

About this book:

Beneath every American city lies a dirty secret: when it rains, millions of gallons of raw sewage and stormwater surge out of century-old pipes and into the rivers we boat, fish, and drink from. Most of us never see it happen—but we pay for it every time it does. *Billions Beneath the Streets* pulls back the pavement on a crisis hidden in plain sight, exposing the 850 billion gallons of untreated overflow that flood urban waterways each year and the multibillion-dollar battle now erupting in city halls, courtrooms, and neighborhoods across the country.

From Philadelphia’s risky bet on rain gardens to Milwaukee’s massive concrete deep tunnels, this book takes you inside six cities caught between old-world engineering and a climate-changed future. As the EPA demands billion-dollar fixes under federal consent decrees, cities are forced to choose: dig deeper into the earth with concrete caverns, or bring nature back to the streets with permeable pavement and green infrastructure. The result is a high-stakes fight over water rates, environmental justice, political will, and the very shape of modern urban life—where the wrong decision could cost communities billions and leave them underwater when the next superstorm hits.

Eye-opening, urgent, and impossible to ignore, *Billions Beneath the Streets* reveals that the debate over sewers is really a debate about who we are and how we’ll survive the storms to come. If you’ve ever wondered where your water goes when it disappears down the drain—or why your utility bill keeps climbing—this is the untold infrastructure story you need to read.