  A flat plumbing basket is a Seifert surface consisting of a disk and bands
contained in distinct pages of the disk open book decomposition of the
3-sphere. In this paper, we examine close connections between flat plumbing
baskets and the contact structure supported by the open book. As an application
we give lower bounds for the flat plumbing basket numbers and determine the
flat plumbing basket numbers for various knots and links, including the torus
links.
