THE DRAINAGE OF THE CITY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5197, 17 November 1877, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE DRAINAGE OF THE CITY.

(Communicated}. “ How shall we drain the city ? is the cry of our perplexed Town Councillors. Good men of business many of them undoubtedly are; and well able to deal with the mtncac.es of'city finance, but about so important, so technical a question as this, they seem most ignorant. In the very beginning the City Cornic'd made a huge mistake. They advertised for the cheapest, not the best, engineer. Talents of high order, great professional ability, and large technical knowledge were considered as mere dross, worth nothing besulo the fact that an unknown man offered to do for £2OO the l work for which a skilled man would have demanded £I4OO. They saved the difference, but how much has that differenc e cost 1 them ? Wo do not wish to decry Mr Olimie’s abilities, but we do say that the Council should: have offered a large sum for an engineer, thereby attracting great talent and knowledge. . They took .Mr. Chime because his tender was the lowest, which was prima facie evldence that he was the worst, because every really high class engineer is earning so much more that he could nob afford to couTe for so little. ' The wisest order of the Council was that declaring the sewage should not be emptied into the harbor. We are quite aware that many dilettante amateurs in sewage matters' loudly assert that the city should be drained into the harbor; but the evidence against this plan is how quite conclusive. Did space permit, we could put before our readers a lar-e amount of evidence in support of this view’ The evidence is quite overwhelming. Of course, the hotter the climate the greater the nuisance. “Along the shores of the Medi terraneau and Black Sea. wheiever a Roman town was formerly situated, ague and fever reigned without intermission, e.g. Rome and its Cloaca Maxima and’lhe Pontine Marshes ; Samsoon on the Black Sea, with its salt marshes, 1 composed almost entirely of town refuse ; Ephesus with its siited-up port, and Smyrna with its alternating beds of oystershells and town refuse. Smyrna still discharges its sulliage into the bay, but it did not affect the towns so much as the opposite side of the bay ‘where the odour was overpowering from the'solid matter which had been deposited on the shore. In our,own day, Scarborough, ‘St. ' Leonards, Hastings, Brighton, Bermuda, Gibraltar, and many other places, bare witness that cannot be argued mto aothin" 'Our harbor is a bay with several shallow bays, and its outlet is by a long narrow funnel, miles away from the place where our sewage would he poured. Contrast this conditidiTwith what has obtained in other towns. Brighton is a narrow town with a long sea front, the coast is bold, the water deep, the current strong, and constant in direction, yet even in" such a place. the sewage created so great a nuisance that,; at great cost, a tunnel ejo-ht miles long was, bored, through the chalk cliffs, and'there the sewage, is cast. out. St. Leonards;and, Hasting form one long town, similarly placed oa a,bold coast, with deep water , and ,strong shore current.. Here, too, the sewage,- instead of being earned away, dunn-tb the beach, and was so foul that the planwas changed, and now all the sewage is carried clear of the town by a large long iron tunnel. “Southport, facing the Irish Sea, add :at the 'entrance of the estuary of the nibble, poured its sewage by several outlets into the sea ; the evils were so great that it is now all carried to a distance of four miles to a l part of the Kibble where the tide is strong.” In Southampton the sewage is poured into Southampton ’Water during the ebbing ti le, which is of great velocity, and yet dredging is necessary. ■ London sewage is very watery staff some > 2lb. or 31b. of solid matter only in one ton of water. This again is fined and poured into the Thames at Crossness, and is believed by many to be productive of much harm ; yet it is poured into a big nver with a streng current made up of running water and’ ebbing tide. It is believed by many that large mud-banks of black gelatinous sewage precipitates are forming in that nver:’. In the Seine, too, great evils are arising ' The Tact Is many people do not really understand what the tide means in a place 1 ike our harbor. It is not, as they suppose, a stroll" current racing steadily in one direction round our harbor. Tides and currents have been' described—the movement thus imparted to the .water is'one-of oscillation backwards and forwards, up and down an inclined plane, varyin" in length with the intensity of the particular tidal wave, and certainly not one of translation to a distance. If the tides were really currents racing round our harbor, why is It that the' 'corpses of drowned people are constantly being thrown up on the beach? Why are they not at once carried out to sea , The answer is simple : The currents do not race., violently round Abe’harbor, prying into and washing out every nook and cranny. If sewage is poured; into the. harbor it will pollute thei bay.- Sewage, deposits will form .at the'modths of sewers like bars in rivers. . Mr. Climie made one great blunder in bis original report; 1 ;'Mr.. Climie should have kjip.iyn' inust,ha|ve known, if lie had had any real knowledge of sewage matters ; or if he had taken the trouble to have read so professipnal a work.,as “The Proceedings of the Institutes of Civil Engineers," 1 he would have found that Mr, l Crawford would not take that sawa»e rat i all, and that to deliver it at a height of only eight feet was an absurdity. We are'quite aware that our scientific and learned KiM."'did'. say at the Philosophical Society’s meeting that he and his heirs would take the whole of Wellington’s sewage for 1000 years to come, and gain £IO,OOO a year by it. But everyone, who kuew-anythiug of such matters knew well that though he made the statement with' the' utmost good faith, he made it iu complete ignorance of the facts. His mistake was- 1 shown him, and he at once'wrote to the Corporation' 1 declining to take it. Had Mr. Cliinls known or read anything of the subject he: would, have at 1 once told the Council that Mr. Crawford’s eyes would be opened, and that he would not take it. Sewage farming has been very extensively tried in _ Great Britain, and always at a loss. There is probably not one single case on record of a sewage farm mailing a profit during several successive years. If it failed iu England how could Mr. Climie possibly believe that in New Zealand'Mr.’"Crawford could level his sanddunes, make his barren' waste into profitable vegetable gardens, and clear money by the transaction. The fact that a really well-read and scientific,sensible man like Mr. Crawford could for a moment have believed that he was going to make £IO,OOO a year by it shows how needful is a technical knowledge of the subject, and should act as a warning to men who, however clever they may he in other matters, are gnorant of even the A B C Of sewerage.