StormSensor Inc.

StormSensor puts sensors through a city's stormwater and sewer network and maps how water actually moves through it, in real time, so a utility can see where the system is about to fail and spend its money there. Storms are getting heavier while cities keep paving, and the drainage underneath was designed for rainfall patterns that no longer occur.

The US will spend on the order of a trillion dollars on water infrastructure in the coming years, and hundreds of cities are under federal consent decree to stop dumping combined sewage into their waterways. The money is going to be spent. Whether it gets spent on the pipes that matter depends on knowing what happens underground during a storm, and cities largely don't, because the network is buried, ageing, and mapped mostly from memory. Adaptation is the part of climate work that rarely gets talked about and arrives first.