Review of Urban Drainage, 4th Edition, by David Butler, Christopher James Digman, Christos Makropoulos, and John W. Davies

With growing urbanization, coupled with climate change and massive migration of people from rural areas to towns and cities, urban drainage is becoming a huge challenge. This book, dealing with both engineering and environmental aspects of rainwater and wastewater drainage from urban areas, is timely. Since the book covers basic principles in sufficient detail, both undergraduate and graduate students will find it useful. It also contains enough material for engineering and environmental practice to be of great value to researchers and practitioners as well.

The book is a long treatise spanning 24 chapters. Introducing urban drainage, Chapter 1 discusses the effects of urbanization, urban drainage priorities, history, geography, and types of drainage systems, and concludes with a schematic of an urban system. Chapter 2 deals with water quality. Discussing both organic and inorganic chemical constituents, it presents processes and receiving-water impacts and standards, and concludes with a discussion of urban pollution management. Wastewater is the subject of Chapter 3. Both domestic and nondomestic wastes are included. Also discussed are infiltration and inflow and wastewater quality. Chapter 4 deals with rainfall. Beginning with measurement, it discusses data analysis, single events, and multiple events, and concludes with treatment of climate change.

Chapter 5 is on stormwater, encompassing runoff generation, overland flow, and stormwater quality. Piped urban drainage is the subject of Chapter 6. Beginning with a discussion of building drainage, it discusses soil and waste drainage and hardware components of sewerage, concluding with urban drainage design. Chapter 7 deals with hydraulics, covering basic principles, pipe flow, part-full pipe flow, and open-channel flow. Hydraulic features are presented in Chapter 8, which includes flow controls, weirs, sewer drops, inverted siphons, gully spacing, and culverts. Chapter 9 treats foul sewers, encompassing design, large sewers, and small sewers. Storm sewers are discussed in Chapter 10. Flow regime, design, contributing area, rational method, time-area method, hydrograph methods, and undeveloped site runoff are the subjects of this chapter.

Flooding is the subject of Chapter 11, which covers exceedance, standards, flood risk, management, and flood resilience. Chapter 12 treats combined sewers and combined sewer overflows (CSOs), including system flows, the role of CSOs, control of pollution from combined sewer systems, approaches to CSO design, effectiveness of CSOs, and details of CSO design. Storage is discussed in Chapter 13. Starting with the function of storage, the chapter continues with overall design, sizing, and alternative routing procedures.

Pumped systems are presented in Chapter 14, which discusses the general arrangement of pumping systems, hydraulic design, rising mains, types of pumps, pumping system design, nongravity systems, and energy use. Chapter 15 discusses structural design and construction, including types of construction, pipes, structural design of open-trench sewers, site investigation, open-trench construction, tunneling, trenchless methods, and costs. Sediments are discussed in Chapter 16, which presents origins, effects, transport, characteristics, and self-cleansing design. Operation and maintenance are the subject of Chapter 17, including maintenance strategies, sewer location and inspection, sewer-cleaning techniques, sustainable urban drainage systems, and gas generation and control. Chapter 19 describes rehabilitation, including sewerage rehabilitation manual (SRM), SRM procedure, methods of structural repair and renovation, and hydraulic rehabilitation.

Chapter 19 presents modeling in practice, covering models of urban drainage systems, urban drainage models, elements of urban drainage models, modeling of unsteady flow, setting up and validating a system model, flood modeling, water quality modeling, modeling pollutant transport, modeling pollutant transformation, use of water quality models, and planning an integrated study. Innovation in modeling is covered in Chapter 20, which includes alternative nonphysical modeling approaches, integrated modeling, coupling models to other models with emerging standards, calibration aspects for integrated urban drainage systems, and uncertainty analysis.

Stormwater management is the subject of Chapter 21. It encompasses devices, elements of design, water quality, sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) applications, issues associated with SuDS, and other stormwater management measures. Chapter 22 deals with smart systems, including real-time control, early-warning systems, and citizen observatories. Global issues are discussed in Chapter 23, which covers health, sanitation option selection, on-site sanitation, off-site sanitation, storm drainage, and greywater management. Chapter 24 discusses sustainable urban water management, sustainability in urban drainage, steps in the right direction, assessing sustainability, resilience, and urban futures.

On the whole, this is an excellent book, written in a lucid and an easy-to-follow style. It will be a good textbook for a course on urban drainage at the senior undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Those who wish to work in the area of urban drainage will also find it a useful source of information. The authors deserve applause for writing this treatise.