Storm drain
rainwater harvesting infrastructure
A storm drain, storm sewer (United Kingdom, U.S. and Canada), highway drain, surface water drain/sewer (United Kingdom), or stormwater drain (Australia and New Zealand) is infrastructure designed to drain excess rain and ground water from impervious surfaces such as paved streets, car parks, parking lots, footpaths, sidewalks, and roofs. Storm drains vary in design from small residential dry wells to large municipal systems.
Drains receive water from street gutters on most motorways, freeways and other busy roads, as well as towns in areas with heavy rainfall that leads to flooding, and coastal towns with regular storms. Even rain gutters from houses and buildings can connect to the storm drain. Since many storm drainage systems are gravity sewers that drain untreated storm water into rivers or streams, any hazardous substances poured into the drains will contaminate the destination bodies of water.
Storm drains sometimes cannot manage the quantity of rain that falls in heavy rains or storms. Inundated drains can cause basement and street flooding. Many areas require detention tanks inside a property that temporarily hold runoff in heavy rains and restrict outlet flow to the public sewer. This reduces the risk of overwhelming the public sewer. Some storm drains mix stormwater (rainwater) with sewage, either intentionally in the case of combined sewers, or unintentionally.
“Storm drain” enters the record as rainwater harvesting infrastructure. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Storm, drain and rainwater can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1139766. The Library of Congress control number is sh85128392. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Storm drain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.