If these pumps ever stop, part of Germany floods.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a well-known example of infrastructure that must run forever to keep an area habitable.
What it is
Tom Scott explains how decades of deep coal mining sank parts of Germany's Ruhr Valley and changed its drainage. Pumps run by Emschergenossenschaft must now work permanently to keep towns and cities from flooding.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends lordswork · 2022-09 · on “The dictatorship of the articulate”
>In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill). I don't think "years" is enough to convey the potential damage unregulated businesses can cause. The time and resources to fix issues can scale well beyond human timescales. This is clearest when environmental damage is involved, whether it be CO2 emissions that will exist for O(100) years in the atmosphere or loss of biodiversity that took O(10,000) years to evolve. Here are a couple of concrete examples of companies inflicting eternal costs onto society that were covered well in Tom Scott videos: The Pumps That Must Run Forever, Or Part Of Germany Floods:
Cites lhorie · 2021-07 · on “Europe floods: At least 120 dead and hundreds unaccounted for”
Yeah, I take issue with the idea that carbon offsets alone will magically fix everything. In Toronto, there was a mandate a few years ago for all houses to disconnect downspouts from the sewer system (so that rainwater is absorbed into the ground of the sprawling suburbs instead of overloading the city plumbing system. They've also been building gigantic water reservoirs by the lake in anticipation of increased pressure in said plumbing systems. I think at this point, it sounds like the people saying we're already too late are not really being alarmist, and that we are going to need to pay that price in the form of lots of infrastructure projects to deal with things like extreme floods. The
Cites deepsummer · 2026-07 · on “Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant”
> The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic. How do you transmit the power? Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it? > Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore. That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore. And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors. > The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport. That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities. > hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage Hydro req