Tandem Water Management

Author: Breakfast

Maintained and controlled by the Leveemen, Tandem's earliest waterworks date back almost to its founding days.

When the Elves first settled Tandem, the bay was a river delta of the Muhan river. Dating back to the early days of Elven settlement, old Tandem has a series of canals built strategically into it, designed to slow down attackers over land as well as to provide a means to somewhat cushion the floods of spring and fall, caused by monsoons and melting mountain ice, and heavy mountain rainfall respectively. In a strategic sense, the canals allowed the Elves to combine their expertise on the water with their excellent skill with the bow and allowed for the deployment of their light Elven ocean grade ships that otherwise still had too much draft to navigate the shallow river delta.

Along with the canals came the option of simply blocking off the Muhan, which during flood season made a floodplane out of what is now The Marrow. All combined, this made it extremely hard to siege the city over land, and made Tandem defensible even against vastly overwhelming numbers.

To this day the canals also serve as a sewer of sorts, which flushes itself with the incoming tide. This doesn't stink, but it does give both the first and the second district a very particular silty smell owing to the algae in the water, much like real world Venice. Anyone that's spent more than a few weeks in these districts would immediately recognize this smell and could tell where they were blindfolded.

After a series of plagues and floods in the years following the human settling of what would later become the Marrow and the Barrows, work was started on a sewage system for the third and fourth districts. There are no canals in these districts, but underneath both of them run man-high tunnels that for the most part do flush with the tide. These flushes bypass the canals of the first and second district, and instead go through three large tunnels that circle around the old city and end up directly in the ocean. These three exit tunnels end in the ocean relatively close together, and, being the security issue that they are, are closely guarded by the navy. Needless to say that "sewer duty" is not exactly the most popular of assignments.

To maintain a level height of water in the spring and fall, and to make sure that the streets don't flood with sewer contents, there is a steam-powered pumping station on the western end of the city, which can pump water out further west into three large floodplanes that are lakes in the spring and fall, soggy grasslands early in the summer, and dry yellow fields of tall grass just before the fall floods make them lakes again. The swamp-like grasslands of early summer smell like a salty compost heap, but late in summer it really isn't that bad. The dry yellow grasses are often harvested by the very poor from the barrows, providing them with hay mattresses and a way of keeping warm in the winter.

The sewers beneath the Barrows and the Marrow form a complex labyrinth, and it is easy to disappear in them, for better or worse. It runs several layers deep in some locations with deeper tunnels being permanently submerged. The sewers are rumoured to have a few secret chambers hidden away inside them, and some even say there are whole temples devoted to forbidden and/or forgotten gods down there. Publicly available maps of the sewers are far from complete, and more than a few would be explorers have drowned as the tunnels flushed and they couldn't find their way to an exit in time.

The tunnels are also rumoured to be connected to hidden tunnels under the nobles' estates on Sapphire Watch. If there is any truth to these rumours is still unknown..