Nearly a century of heavy stormwater flow had eroded the drainage system at the historic federal building and U.S. District Courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa. The cost of replacement wasn’t feasible, so operations staff needed another solution.Roof water runoff from the building is directed by a drainpipe network to enclosed-wall risers. Each precipitation event for the past 90 years has delivered the equivalent of a half city block’s rainfall down the pipes in a 70-foot freefall. While scale and rust had taken their toll on the entire drainage system, one of the risers tasked with redirecting each torrent to the
