The Pipes Were Fine for Eighty Years (Episode 13)

Our basement flooded last Friday.We’ve lived in this house since 2020. It’s flooded twice before, a few inches each time ... enough to be annoying, not enough to be alarming. This time it was feet, not inches. And it wasn’t just our house. It was the whole street. The pipes that failed don’t run under our foundation. They run under the road, and every house that drains into them found out at the same time we did.Those pipes were laid around 1940 (when most of the houses were originally built). For eighty-some years, the pipes did their job. Then a storm came through that dumped more water, faster, than they were ever sized to carry ... hotter air holds more moisture, and when it lets go, it lets go all at once, in a way nobody designing a drainage system in 1940 had reason to plan for. The pipes did a 1940’s job in a 2026 reality.So far, so good, is the entire logic of underground infrastructure. Nobody thinks about the pipe until the day the whole street finds out at once it can’t keep up. The city is supposedly bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers to help make sure this doesn’t happen again, but what if it didn’t have to happen in the first place?...The meteorological storms aren’t 1940’s storms anymore. I pray we don’t repeat the same mistakes of that decade politically, economically, and internationally. Practically speaking though, it’s worth checking whether your pipes and your financial “rules” are sized for the future that’s actually coming. Are they even sized for today?What’s a piece of financial advice you were taught that you’ve started to wonder if anyone’s actually checked lately? Tell me which one and perhaps it’ll show up in a future post. Comments are open at https://livecounterflow.substack.com/. Get full access to Live Counterflow at livecounterflow.substack.com/subscribe