Sanitation and sanitary engineering by Gerhard William Paul 1854-

Author:Gerhard, William Paul, 1854-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sanitary engineering
Publisher: New York
Published: 1909-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

Instances are multiplying rapidly where large towns find themselves under the necessity of spending vast sums of money to tap distant uncontaminated sources of water supply. Owing to the contamination of the Hudson River water by the sewage of cities located upstream, the city of Albany was obliged to construct large sand filtration works. Similar works have been

carried out for the Schuylkill River water at Philadelphia, for the Allegheny River water at Pittsburg, and for the Ohio River at Cincinnati and Louisville. St. Louis has for many years suffered from an insufficient capacity of its waterworks and not less from the] muddy condition of its water; new works have now been put in operation and filtration of the river water is contemplated. In this connection mention should be made of the valuable researches on sand filtration of water, made by the chemists and biologists of the Lawrence Experimental Station of the Massachusetts State Board of Health 9 and of the Louisville and Cincinnati experiments on mechanical pressure filters.

Sewerage. — The progress in sewerage works has been much slower than that in works of water supply. This can be, in a measure, explained by the fact that taxpayers are nearly always willing to pay a small annual tax for water, and hence the financial success of such a scheme is rarely in doubt, whereas a sewerage system does not yield an annual revenue, but, on the contrary, causes sometimes large operating expenses, for instance when the sewage must be purified before it can be safely discharged into a water-course. It is, therefore, a much more difficult matter to induce communities to introduce a sewer system. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that the introduction of a public water supply has generally been a stimulus to sewer construction.

Sewers were originally built with a view of removing the storm water from the street surfaces; the intro-

duction of liquid household wastes followed only incidentally, and the removal of human excreta by water carriage is of still more recent origin. While the construction of sewers by civil engineers dates from the beginning of the last century, and even from earlier times, the sanitary features and functions of a sewer system and the benefits to public health derived therefrom have been but recently studied and recognized.

Prior to the year 1850, few, if any, cities had a regular system of sewerage, built in accordance with a well-studied general improvement plan. We do find, however, in the older cities underground conduits, built by unskillful mechanics in a haphazard manner, without any attempt to make them water-tight, or to construct them in the way in which conduits for the removal of foul water and excrements should be built. Before the year 1815, the introduction of faecal matters into the sewers of London was prohibited; it was made compulsory in that city only in 1847. In St. Louis, a similar condition existed up to the year 1842, while in Baltimore and Paris this is the case even at the present day.

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