The sewer system of Iquitos, Peru is
old, built originally around 1890, during the Rubber Boom, and it
needs a serious upgrade; or, in fact, a total redo. Much if not all
of the city is now undergoing that process, and it brings with it
some inconvenience, and in some cases, more, sometimes serious injury
and death due to construction that impedes traffic and ends up
killing people when roads aren't closed or even properly marked as
under repair. Some people in Iquitos are justifiably outraged. But
progress marches on, and the new sewer system will come about
regardless.
To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
Until recently sewage was an assumed
aspect of life that one endured along with disease and debilitation
and war and death. Few gave it it the slightest thought, relieving
themselves at will regardless of place or occasion. There have been
sporadic attempts to remove sewage from living quarters, but they
were rare and discontinued shortly. People endured the filth.
3200 BCE Scotland: In the Orkney
Islands excavations show early drainage systems. At Maes Howe the
“first lavatory-like plumbing systems were fitted into recesses in
the walls of homes -- with drained outlets. Certain liquid wastes
drained to area(s) either under or outside of buildings/homes.”
http://www.sewerhistory.org/chronos/bib.htm
India is perhaps the first site of toilets and sewers, (c.f. D.W.
Walker,
A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol IV. Oikos II:
World and Man. [In progress])
Ancient cities used covered channels
and pipes to remove wastes from buildings, probably as far back as
8000 B.C. There is evidence of indoor plumbing pipes in Scotland from
that time, although the sewage was tunneled straight out to a nearby
creek [source: Bloomington]. Cesspits were found under homes in Iraq
dating from as long ago as 4000 B.C. These systems fell into
disrepair during the Middle Ages. Throughout this era, wastes and
refuse were simply thrown out into the street. By the 18th century,
many large cities had systems for removing rainwater, but sewage was
usually disposed of in cesspools.
http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/what-history-sewage-treatment-systems
Because man is at least a social if not a herd animal, the concept
of personal privacy is a late development, man generally having lived
in immediate proximity to other men, and also with domestic animals,
the sewage piling up unnoticed till the rise of cities during the
Industrial Age and the population explosion brought about by rational
agricutlure, at which time people began dying en masse due to what
was at the time thought of as the curse of miasma, i.e. bad air, the
cause of disease as if was understood before the general if reluctant
acceptance of germ theory. Previously, sewage systems were spotty at
best.
4000 - 2500 BCE Eshnunna/Babylonia - Mesopotamian Empire (Iraq)
Had stormwater drain systems in
the streets; drains were constructed of sun-baked bricks or cut
stone. Some homes were connected. [The need for proper disposal of
human wastes was not fully understood -- but there was a recognition
of some of the benefits (less odor, etc.) of taking these wastes
away from homes.]
In Babylon, in some of the larger
homes, people squatted over an opening in the floor of a small
interior room. The wastes fell through the opening into a perforated
cesspool located under the house. Those cesspools were often made of
baked perforated clay rings -- ranging in size from 18" to 36"
in diameter -- stacked atop each other. Smaller homes often had
smaller cesspools (18" diameter); larger homes ... more people
... had larger diameter cesspools. The annular space (1') outside of
the cesspools' walls were often filled with pieces of broken pottery
to better the percolation rates.
- Origin of the earliest known pipe: Babylonia was documented
by many as one of the first places to mold clay into pipe (via
potter's wheel). Tees and angle joints were produced and then baked
to make drainage pipe ... all as early as 4000 BCE.
http://www.sewerhistory.org/chronos/bib.htm
Rome was probably the first Western city to house a permanent
population of one million people, c. 1 B.C. They created an aqueduct
system to provide water to the city, and the overflow cleaned the
streets by chance. Public latrines made an appearance, and the Cloaca
Maxima was constructed.
800 BCE - 300 CE Rome
Complex drain systems evolved
(initially, and primarily, for storm water and for draining
marshes).
Public latrines were used by many
people, but for the most part, human wastes were thrown into the
street.
First sewer constructed between
800 and 735 BCE.
Rome had extensive street washing
programs (water supplied by aqueducts, the first being built in 312
BCE). Only a few homes had water piped directly from the aqueducts.
The vast majority of the people came to fountains to gather their
water. Even though not many homes were directly plumbed into the
sewers, when the wastes were thrown into the street, the street
washing resulted in most of the human wastes ending up in the sewers
anyway!
Direct connection of homes to the
sewers was not mandated until nearly 100 CE. (Cost was a factor;
also mandating such a connection was then considered an invasion of
privacy.)
Sewage resulting from the public
baths and the included latrines was discharged into sewers. It is
worth noting that the Romans recognized the value of their water
(which had been transported to the city via aqueducts, often over a
distance of 20-30 miles); as such, any wastewater from the public
bath facilities was often re-used, frequently as the flushing water
that flowed continuously through the public latrine facilities. From
the latrines, it flowed to a point of discharge into the sewer
system.
- The Romans were proud of their "rooms of easement"
(i.e., latrines). Public baths included such rooms -- adjacent to
gardens. There Roman officials would sometimes continue discussions
with visiting dignitaries while sitting on the latrines. Elongated
rectangular platforms with several adjacent seats were utilized
(some with privacy partitions, but most without). These latrine
rooms were often co-ed, as were the baths. As noted earlier, water
from the public baths, or brush water from the aqueduct system,
flowed continuously in troughs beneath the latrine seats; the sewage
(along with waste bath water) was delivered to the sewers beneath
the city, and eventually to the Tiber River.
The 11' x 12' Cloaca Maxima ("Main
Drain" -- finished in 510 BCE, and made of hewn stone, no
cement) drained to the Tiber River. Its original purpose was to
drain a marsh ... upon which a large portion of Rome was eventually
built. The sewer has remained in service for over 2400 years.
Sewer infrastructure throughout
the city was essentially completed by 100 CE; some direct
connections of individual homes began to appear. Terra-cotta pipe
was utilized. If a pipe had to withstand pressure, it was often
fully embedded (i.e., sealed) in concrete -- a practice the Romans
started.
Sewer odors were a problem, since
there were very few vents from the sewers. Any connections to public
baths, or to the few houses that were connected, served as vents in
the early years -- making life interesting (odor-wise) in those
facilities.
- Roman courtesy also extended to visitors, and to people with
emergencies:
The result was
fewer wastes on the streets of Roman cities; still, the majority of
human wastes (of the masses) ended up in the streets.
The Roman Empire fell in early CE
along with the concepts of baths, basic sanitation, aqueducts,
engineered water or sewage systems, etc.
http://www.sewerhistory.org/chronos/bib.htm
With the fall of the Roman Empire Europe was cast into what
French historian Jules Michele called “a thousand years without a bath,” also known as The Dark Ages. Between the inability of the northern
invaders to admnister the previous empire and the Muslim destruction
of civilization and blockade of most of Europe from trade on the
Mediterranean, Europe slid into autocracy, the manorial system of
production in which locals starved to death within site of their
unhelpful neighbours in a much romanticised commune system. The
population of Europe plummeted, and any concern about hygiene in a
time of frequent famine was secondary at best. With the beginnings of
the Industrial Revolution and the growth of Western European
economies again reaching the level of the Roman Imperial age, the
population of Europe rose as well, and with it the rapid development
of cities, necessitating, though delayed, resisted, and dismissed as
useless, the installation of sewage systems. But cities were a
literal death trap, and workers were needed to keep up industrial
production in them. To an extent, london's lowest classes were the
sanitation system in the first half of the 19th century, scavenging
and sorting debris and filth and keeping it from the guts of at least
some city residents.
All of these occupations were
considered to be of low social class.
Toshers, also sometimes called
grubbers, scavenged through the sewers looking for anything of
value. They helped to ease the flow in the sewer systems by removing
small items. Often whole families worked as toshers. This gave them
some immunity to sewage-related diseases that killed many.
Mudlarks scavenged in the mud of
the Thames and other rivers. They were generally young children who
retrieved small items and sold them for very small amounts.
Nightsoil men removed human,
animal, and household waste from London to farms outside the city
for use as manure. However, as London expanded, there were fewer
farms and they were further from the city. A farmer would have to
pay an average of 2s 6d (12½p) for the manure. The trade ceased
almost completely in 1870 when guano (deposits of bird droppings)
from South America became available more cheaply. This caused an
increase of households dumping waste into the street where it made
its way to the Thames through the sewers and rivers.
- Flushermen were employed by the Court of Sewers. These men
would literally "flush" away waste and anything that might
block the flow of water in the new sewer system.
C.f. Henry
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Four Vols. 1851 - 1861.
[Three volumes 1851; Vol Four co-written
with Bracebridge Hemyng, John Binny and Andrew Halliday, 1861].
But the scavenging poor were not enough. People we dying in large
numbers.
Unlike today when every minor ache and pain seems to have a remedy
available at the local pharmacy, previously one endured or died
without painkillers. Dr. John Snow was the first to use ether during
operations, treating patients without inflicting so much pain they
died from that alone. He did even more.
When cholera spread through early 19th
century London, most residents thought the deadly disease was spread
by some sort of mysterious airborne organism. Severe outbreaks killed
tens of thousands of people four times between 1831 and 1854 in
several industrial English towns and the worst London outbreak in
1853 killed more than 10,000 people alone. Anesthesiologist John Snow
was able to map the Soho outbreak and the relation between cholera
deaths and pumps located near sewage in the Thames River [source:
Summers]. He was able to convince local citizens, authorities and
fellow physicians that the disease was not an airborne one, but
related to the sewage-tainted water.
Snow was able to convince people living near the water source of
cholera at Soho to stop drinking the population that was killing so
many, and he did so by padlocking the pump. Reason prevailed later.
When it did it had some great help from parliamentarians so sick from
the stench of the Thames river outside the House of Parliament that
they could not endure it longer, and they began the long and
expensive project of cleaning up London by installing a sewerage
system, the leader of that project being Joseph Bazelgette.
Bazelgette was called in to deal with The Big Stink. Miasma, or bad
air, was assumed to be the cause of cholera, and to eliminate the bad
air the idea was to remove what caused it, i.e. sewage. The germs
involved were not counted for. Still the sewerage system was built.
Imagine the smell that three million
Londoners could make if their toilets poured into overflowing
cesspools or drains in the street, or if they emptied chamberpots out
of their windows. It’s unthinkable now, but that was reality in
1855.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Victorians
knew this wasn’t healthy, but not why. When Queen Victoria came to
the throne, only half of London’s infants lived to their fifth
birthday. Diseases such as cholera were rife in the capital.
The
first recorded case of cholera in England was in Newcastle in 1831,
and there were major outbreaks in 1849 and 1854. But there was no
cure and no treatment.
The Big Stink was so big, so stinking, that one hundred years
later the expression was common in the United States, my grandfather
often scoffing at some minor kerfuffle with the line, “What's the
big stink?” Mention of cholera, on the other hand, made his face
turn pale from painful memories.
The 1854 discovery by Filippo Pacini of Vibrio
cholerae, the bacterium that caused the disease, was ignored
until it was rediscovered thirty years later by Robert Koch. In 1854
London physician Dr John Snow discovered that the disease was
transmitted by drinking water contaminated by sewage after an
epidemic centred in Soho, but this idea was not widely accepted.
Consolidating several separate local bodies concerned with sewers,
the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was established in 1848; it
surveyed London's antiquated sewerage system and began ridding the
capital of its cesspits—an objective later accelerated by the
"Great Stink".
The experts of the London medical
establishment of the time were committed to a useless idea they
mostly refused to let go of: miasma, or disease caused by “bad
air.” Yesteryear's experts were no stupider than ours today. Two
men, however, John Snow and a local minister, Reverend Henry
Whitehead, fought the establishment and eventually won, closing the
Soho pump that was spreading cholera in the city.
Having attended many patients during
the 1849 outbreak without contracting cholera himself, he [Dr John
Snow] realised that it could not be transmitted through the air.
Then, the pattern of an outbreak in 1854 in Soho allowed him to track
the source to a popular water pump in Broad Street (now Broadwick
Street). Particularly telling was the fact that none of the 70
workers in the local brewery died, as they only drank beer.
Although
Snow was [not immediately] unaware of it, a sewer was leaking into
the Broad Street well. Sadly, such cross contamination between the
sewage system and water supplies was typical.
Snow did figure out the problem of contaminated water from the
well, and thus saved countless lives and created the first demand for
a proper sewerage system in London.
Only when the problem was
literally forced up the noses of MPs at their new Houses of
Parliament during the ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858 did
something get done about it. Parliament gave £3 million to the
Metropolitan Board of Works to sort out the problem. The task was
taken on by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who designed and
constructed five major brick-lined sewers measuring 132 km (82
miles); three north of the river and two to the south. These
connected with existing sewers and pumping stations were built at
strategic locations to keep the sewage flowing.
In
the Middle Ages, cities in Western Europe were mostly centres for
military and religious quarters, a few guilds allowed inside the city
gates for supply, the rest of the population relegated to the outside
and to semi-self-sufficient farming manors. City populations rarely
exceeded a few thousand people, and sewage, regardless of how we
would see it today, was not a considerable problem for those
residents. But with the rise on industrial production and the need
for floating populations of workers at hand, cities grew to
previously unimaginable sizes, bringing with them their physical
needs as well as their labour. Sewage and overcrowding brought
disease on a massive scale.
In
earlier times Londoners got their water from wells or the river.
There were few people and the sewage, though a problem, was not
devastating,
Until the late 16th century, London
citizens were reliant for their water supplies on water from shallow
wells, the River Thames, its tributaries, or one of around a dozen
natural springs, including the spring at Tyburn which was connected
by lead pipe to a large cistern or tank (then known as a conduit):
the Great Conduit in Cheapside. ...
Wealthy Londoners living near to a
conduit pipe could obtain permission for a connection to their homes,
but this did not prevent unauthorised tapping of conduits. Otherwise
- particularly for households which could not take a gravity-feed,
water from the conduits was provided to individual households by
water carriers, or "cobs". ...
In 1582 Dutchman Peter Morice leased
the northernmost arch of London Bridge and, inside the arch,
constructed a waterwheel that pumped water from the Thames to various
places in London. Further waterwheels were added in 1584 and 1701,
and remained in use until 1822.
Recycling might be some good idea in some cases, but it turns bad
when one recycles sewage into household use. Many residents of the
Belen area of Iquitos, Peru face a problem similar to that of London
in the 19th century. Disposing properly of household waste is
expensive and impractical for those living on floating houses or
houses built on stilts on the riverbank. Sewage goes, and sewage
comes back again.
[I]n 1815 house waste was permitted to
be carried to the Thames via the sewers, so for seven years human
waste was dumped into the Thames and then potentially pumped back to
the same households for drinking, cooking and bathing. Prior to the
Great Stink there were over 200,000 cesspits in London. Emptying one
cesspit cost a shilling - a cost the average London citizen then
could ill afford. As a result, most cesspits added to the airborne
stench.
In the Belen area many building lack basic plumbing, and thus
during the six month low water season, the sewage is not swept away
by the Amazon river. Belen in effect becomes one large cesspit. At
least there are very few toilets to add to the mess.
Part of the [London] problem was due
to the introduction of flush toilets, replacing the chamber-pots that
most Londoners had used. These dramatically increased the volume of
water and waste that was now poured into existing cesspits. These
often overflowed into street drains designed originally to cope with
rainwater, but now also used to carry outfalls from factories,
slaughterhouses and other activities, contaminating the city before
emptying into the River Thames.
The summer of 1858 was unusually hot.
The Thames and many of its urban tributaries were overflowing with
sewage; the warm weather encouraged bacteria to thrive and the
resulting smell was so overwhelming that it affected the work of the
House of Commons (countermeasures included draping curtains soaked in
chloride of lime, while members considered relocating upstream to
Hampton Court) and the law courts (plans were made to evacuate to
Oxford and St Albans). Heavy rain finally ended the heat and humidity
of summer and the immediate crisis ended. However, a House of Commons
select committee was appointed to report on the Stink and recommend
how to end the problem.
Consolidating several separate local
bodies concerned with sewers, the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers
was established in 1848; it surveyed London's antiquated sewerage
system and began ridding the capital of its cesspits—an objective
later accelerated by the "Great Stink".
….
[I]in 1855 the Metropolitan Board of
Works which, after rejecting many schemes for "merciful
abatement of the epidemic that ravaged the Metropolis", accepted
a scheme to implement sewers proposed in 1859 by its chief engineer,
Joseph Bazalgette. The intention of this very expensive scheme was to
resolve the epidemic of cholera by eliminating the stench which was
believed to cause it. Over the next six years the main elements of
the London sewerage system were created. As an unintended consequence
the water supply ceased to be contaminated; this resolved the cholera
epidemic.
Iquitos has a sewerage system, now
antiquated and in the process of up-grading. The original and the
current projects are thanks to men like John Snow and Joseph
Bazalgette.
John
Snow (15 March 1813 – 16 June 1858)
Snow was a sceptic of the
then-dominant miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera
or the Black Death were caused by pollution or a noxious form of "bad
air". The germ theory of disease had not yet been developed, so
Snow did not understand the mechanism by which the disease was
transmitted. His observation of the evidence led him to discount the
theory of foul air. He first publicized his theory in an essay On the
Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1849. ... In 1855 he published a
second edition of his article, documenting his more elaborate
investigation of the effect of the water supply in the Soho, London
epidemic of 1854.
By talking to local residents (with
the help of Reverend Henry Whitehead), he identified the source of
the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick
Street). Although Snow's chemical and microscope examination of a
water sample from the Broad Street pump did not conclusively prove
its danger, his studies of the pattern of the disease were convincing
enough to persuade the local council to disable the well pump by
removing its handle. This action has been commonly credited as ending
the outbreak, but Snow observed that the epidemic may have already
been in rapid decline:
Snow later used a dot map to
illustrate the cluster of cholera cases around the pump. He also used
statistics to illustrate the connection between the quality of the
water source and cholera cases. He showed that the Southwark and
Vauxhall Waterworks Company was taking water from sewage-polluted
sections of the Thames and delivering the water to homes, leading to
an increased incidence of cholera. Snow's study was a major event in
the history of public health and geography. It is regarded as the
founding event of the science of epidemiology.
Later, researchers discovered that
this public well had been dug only three feet from an old cesspit,
which had begun to leak fecal bacteria. The nappies of a baby, who
had contracted cholera from another source, had been washed into this
cesspit. Its opening was originally under a nearby house, which had
been rebuilt farther away after a fire. The city had widened the
street and the cesspit was lost. It was common at the time to have a
cesspit under most homes. Most families tried to have their raw
sewage collected and dumped in the Thames to prevent their cesspit
from filling faster than the sewage could decompose into the soil.
After the cholera epidemic had
subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street Pump Handle.
They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population,
and afterward they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal
would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-fecal method
transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the
public to contemplate.
Entrenched interests often impede
progress and cause countless unnecessary deaths and immense suffering
before the forces of reaction are swept away by a few brave men with
the right idea. One such man is Joseph Bazalgette.
Sir
Joseph William Bazalgette, CB (b. 1819 – d. 1891) was chief
engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works. His major
achievement was the creation (in response to the "Great
Stink" of 1858) of a sewer network for central London which
was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics, while
beginning the cleansing of the River Thames.
[When] London's short-lived
Metropolitan Commission of Sewers ordered that all cesspits should be
closed and that house drains should connect to sewers and empty into
the Thames, [the result was] a cholera epidemic (1848–49) that
killed 14,137 Londoners.
Bazalgette was appointed assistant
surveyor to the Commission in 1849, taking over as Engineer in 1852.
[A]nother cholera epidemic struck in 1853, killing 10,738. Medical
opinion at the time held that cholera was caused by foul air: a
so-called miasma. Physician John Snow had earlier advanced a
different explanation, which is now known to be correct: cholera was
spread by contaminated water. His view was not generally accepted.
Championed by fellow engineer Isambard
Kingdom Brunel, Bazalgette was appointed chief engineer of the
Commission's successor, the Metropolitan Board of Works, in 1856....
In 1858, the year of the Great Stink, Parliament passed an enabling
act, in spite of the colossal expense of the project, and
Bazalgette's proposals to revolutionise London's sewerage system
began to be implemented. The expectation was that enclosed sewers
would eliminate the stink ('miasma'), and that this would then reduce
the incidence of cholera.
At the time, the Thames was little
more than an open sewer.... Bazalgette's solution ... was to
construct 82 miles (132 km) of underground brick main sewers to
intercept sewage outflows, and 1,100 miles (1,800 km) of street
sewers to intercept the raw sewage.... The outflows were diverted
downstream where they were dumped, untreated, into the Thames. ...
The scheme involved major pumping
stations at Deptford (1864) and at Crossness (1865) on the Erith
marshes, both on the south side of the Thames, and at Abbey Mills (in
the River Lea valley, 1868) and on the Chelsea Embankment (close to
Grosvenor Bridge; 1875), north of the river.
The system was opened by Edward,
Prince of Wales in 1865, although the whole project was not actually
completed for another ten years.
Bazalgette's foresight may be seen in
the diameter of the sewers. When planning the network he took the
densest population, gave every person the most generous allowance of
sewage production and came up with a diameter of pipe needed. He then
said 'Well, we're only going to do this once and there's always the
unforeseen' and doubled the diameter to be used. His foresight
allowed for the unforeseen increase in population density with the
introduction of the tower block; with the original, smaller pipe
diameter the sewer would have overflowed in the 1960s, rather than
coping until the present day as it has.
The unintended consequence of the new
sewer system was to eliminate cholera not only in places that no
longer stank, but wherever water supplies ceased to be contaminated
by sewage. The basic premise of this expensive project, that miasma
spread cholera infection, was wrong; however, instead of this causing
the project to fail, the new sewers succeeded in virtually
eliminating the disease by removing the contamination.
Bazalgette's capacity for hard work
was remarkable; every connection to the sewerage system by the
various Vestry Councils had to be checked and Bazalgette did this
himself and the records contain thousands of linen tracings with
handwritten comments in Indian ink on them "Approved JWB"
"I do not like 6" used here and 9" should be used.
JWB" and so on. It is perhaps not surprising that his health
suffered as a result.
Below are some fun facts about sewers. Who knew!?
"Sewer - A
pipe or conduit, generally closed, but normally not flowing full, for
carrying sewage and other wastes."
"Sanitary
Sewer - A sewer which carries sewage and excludes storm, surfaces and
ground water."
"Flush Tank
- A chamber in which water, or sewage, is accumulated and discharged
at intervals for flushing a sewer."
"Lamp-hole
- A small vertical pipe or shaft leading from the surface of the
ground to a sewer, for admitting a light for purposes of inspection."
"Manhole -
A shaft, or chamber, from the surface of the ground to a sewer, large
enough to enable a person to have access for the purpose of
inspections or cleaning."
"Manhole
Head - The cast iron fixture surmounting a manhole. It is made up of
two parts: A 'Frame' which rests on the masonry of the shaft, and a
removable 'Cover.' Frames are either 'Fixed' or 'Adjusted' in height.
Covers are 'Tight,' 'Ventilated,' or 'Anti rattling.' "
Manholes
covers: covers started off as slabs of stone, maybe pieces of wood --
which they remained from 3500 BC through the 1750s-1850s CE. For the
last 200+ years, iron works in the United States have made cast-iron
manhole covers, some weighing as much as 300 lbs. each, some
rectangular, some square, but for the most part, round. The oldest
available foundry catalog for manhole covers dates back to 1860.
The phrase "manhole" -- even
though some people today want to change it for gender-sensitivity
reasons -- was first used to describe the access holes between the
decks of old, all-male, sailing ships. The word "manhole"
(initially) had nothing to do with sewers.
It wasn't until later that the term
was used to describe the structure through which access to sewers
(initially, to new "separate" sewers) for maintenance could
be achieved. Perhaps the name was adopted because it was, in essence,
a hole into which a person (man) would go to do maintenance, or it
was adopted from one level (street level) to another level (the sewer
beneath the street). We'll probably never know for sure.
In fact, some believe the word "sewer"
is derived from the term "seaward" in Old English. Early
sewers in the London area were open ditches which led to the Thames
River, and from there on down to the sea ("seaward").
As you can see, not a whole lot has
changed in the years between the 1870s and now relative to the
philosophy of manhole design, definitions, etc.; mainly materials and
installation techniques have changed. The early designers had an
amazingly good sense of what was needed.
Sewer pipe: In the
very early years of sewers in the United States, hollowed-out logs
were utilized to convey sewage from a single dwelling to the nearest
stream or, sometimes, as a part of a larger conveyance "system"
for a small town. Some larger "combined" systems utilized
brick, sometimes cut stone, slate, or even wood (mostly, for the
inverts); many combinations of materials were utilized depending on
the types of materials available locally. The size/shapes of the
sewers varied in almost direct proportion to the number of designers
involved.
Sometime in the 1820s in Europe, the
concept of building oval-shaped sewers evolved [See John Roe, named
after fish eggs, conceivably the inspiration for his egg-saped sewer
pipe,] (as opposed to the previous flat-bottom, rectangular
cross-sectional sewers), supposedly to help diminish the possibility
of the sedimentation of solids/sand via the provision of higher
(scour) velocities at low flows.
As the industry improved, and it was
realized that fewer joints (especially if they weren't always well
sealed) were better, the industry responded with 3' laying lengths of
pipe.
Cast-iron pipe began
to become available in the mid-1700s for municipal water service. The
first large-scale use of cast-iron pipe for distribution of water
occurred in 1664 at Versaille, France. A 15-mile cast-iron main was
installed from Marley-on-Seina to the palace at Versailles; the
system is still in service today. The bell-and-spigot joint was
developed by Sir Thomas Simpson in 1785 (London) for cast-iron pipe
and has been in use ever since. The early versions used "butt"
joints sealed with metal bands.
And the sewerage fun will continue as soon as Senor Marvin Rios of
Iquitos gets off his arse and decides to continue our interview about
the state of the sewer up-grade project in the city. He has much to
offer, though he has recently been somewhat constipated when it comes
to letting it all out for the interested public.
When Sr. Rios stops
pissing on my shoes we'll have more on this story from Iquitos, Peru.
For those whose appetite for all things sewer and toilet is only whetted, please turn to the following links for more, far more, about this fascinating if weird topic.
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/11/straight-flush-plumbing.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/11/plumb-lucky-w-hodding-carter-flushed.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/11/beauty-of-sewers.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/11/grateness-of-sewers.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-cant-pass-up-good-sewer.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/12/long-live-toilets.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/11/flush-with-pride-bindeshwar-pathak.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2006/12/paean-to-household-cleaning-products.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2005/06/crappers-bida-tres-moderne.html
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-hail-comrade-chlorine.html
A gentle reminder that my book is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html
Posts
