The Search for the Ultimate Sink by Joel A. Tarr

Author:Joel A. Tarr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781884836060
Publisher: University of Akron Press

SOURCES: Compiled from miscellaneous federal, state, and professional reports.

*1932 data.

By the beginning of the First World War, the perspective of the sanitary engineers on the question of the disposal of raw sewage into streams had triumphed over that of the “sentimentalists and medical authorities” who opposed the use of streams for disposal. Essentially, the engineering position was that the dilution power of streams should be utilized to its fullest for sewage disposal, so long as no danger was posed to the public health or to property rights and no nuisance created. Water filtration and/or chlorination could serve to protect the public from waterborne disease.33

The practical consequences of this position can be seen in the aggregate figures for sewered population, population served by sewage treatment, and population served by water treatment from 1910 to 1930 (see table 3). In this period, while the population newly served by sewers rose by over 25 million, the additional number whose sewage was treated rose only 13.5 million. At the same time, the increase in the population receiving treated water was approximately 33 million. In 1930, not only did the great majority of urban populations dispose of their untreated sewage by dilution in waterways, but their numbers were actually increasing over those who were treating their sewage before discharge. Because of the successes of water filtration and chlorination, however, waterborne infectious disease had greatly diminished and the earlier crisis atmosphere that had led to the first state legislation had disappeared.

Professional Impacts of Wastewater Technology: Sanitary Engineering

The implementation of any large-scale and capital-intensive technology, such as sewerage, will produce a range of institutional, economic, and social changes. Some of these are logical and predictable, while others are unintended and unanticipated. As was noted earlier, negative health effects were the largest single unanticipated effect of the implementation of sewerage systems and produced attempts to regulate water pollution. This section will deal with the development of the profession of sanitary engineering; the following sections will address the effects of wastewater technology on governmental structure, administration planning, and forecasting. In these realms, changes sometimes were based on perceptions of the needs of the technology and sometimes conceived as adaptations to the impacts of the technology.

The development of a new technology with a set of unique characteristics requiring a special body of knowledge and techniques inevitably produces a community of practitioners. This community, or a more specialized subset of the community, may in time attempt to create a profession—a group of people who profess to hold a body of specialized knowledge that enables them to treat a certain class of problems or phenomena. Although a broad class of practitioners may initially claim to have relevant competence, eventually this group is narrowed down, is institutionalized, sets standards to determine entrance into the group, and acquires professional autonomy.34 When it achieves that autonomy, it may attempt to extend its domain, as well as prevent others from encroaching on its territory.

This was essentially what happened with sanitary engineering, which originated in England as part of the broader public health and sanitation movements.

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