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Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1231, 22 December 1882, Page 2

Eighty-seven degrees in the shade and all’s well I Where now’ are the people who didn’t want a water supply ? Where are those of little faith and having a goodly number of tanks rounds their dwellings who looked upon a water supply as “premature?” Where are the wiseacres who wanted to put off bringing in the water until the drains were made ? We only wish they were compelled to sit every day in an office Bft. by 10ft. and having a corrugated iron roof overhead, and have to write there for six or seven hours a day. What we shall do for water this summer appears to us to be a pertinent question. Many of the residents in Gisborne are already reduced to using their well water for drinking purposes. It is to be hoped that any persons who are so rereduced as to their water supply, will not omit the simple precaution of boiling the water first ana filtering it afterwards ; and also not neglect to clean their filter out at least once a week. Without the slightest doubt we shall have dangerous fevers and other diseases this summer, especially among children, from the use of well water. Filters are not expensive articles to buy and are less so to make, and we would recommend our readers to make or have made, fc r themselves,ffi Iters on the principle recommended by the Ven. Archdeacon Williams for the use of the Gisborne Hospital. There is no reason to doubt that the Archdeacon will gladly impart to any one desirous of knowing it, the plan upon which these filters were designed by himself. In. the use of well water, boiling and filtration becomes an absolute necessity ; without it the drinker is absorbing the germs of disease -and death. Even rain water should be carefully filtered before being used for drinking purposes, but with well water one cannot üße too many precautions. We sincerely hop <e, but fear we hope in vain, soon to hear of some decisive measure being adopted in. the Borough Council tending to give us a really ample water supply laid on to every house in the town. We have heard, but little lately of artesian wells, and yet we have very little doubt that a boring in any part of the Borough of Gisborne would strike excellent spring water at 60 feet depth. That would do something for us, but it would not give the pressure necessary to pipe leadings, or for fire protection. Still if it would give us each a wholesome freshwater bath three or four times a day we might well be grateful for such a boon. So far as a supply which shall be of magnitude sufficient to put out large fires, we suppose there is no chance of hearing of, or seeing, anything being actually done to that end until after the next big fire, which is just as likely to happen to-night, or to-morrow night, or any other night, as it is to happen, at all. Then for a few weeks all will be activity and stir, and plans will be made, and estimates will be submitted, and measurements taken, and public meetings will be held, and all will ultimately resolve itself into what Mrs Nickleby’s old mad gentleman called “gas and gaiters.” Gisborne has had some very narrow escapes since Carr & Sons’ fire. Had the “Herald” office caught properly when the attempt was made to fire it about seven months ago nothing on earth could have saved that block. Had Messrs Parnell & Boylan’s establishment once thoroughly ignited when the attempt was made to fire it, what could have saved the block ? And perhaps the adjoining one would have gone with it. How in a town like this, composed entirely of wooden buildings, some of them as rotten as tinder, and as readily inflammable, theowners of valuable stock can be content to go to bed, not knowing at what moment they may be roused by the fire bell to find their ruination a dead certainty, in preference to enforcing such proper and necessary precautions against such a calamity as a water supply would afford, we utterly fail to even imagine. The more so as the introduction of water would reduce insurance from 65s per £lOO to about 25s per £lOO. Truly we are a stiff-necked generation. We prefer chancing fire to bringing in water, disease to health ; a draught of nastiness to a drink of pure water; a cloud of pulverised papa to a water-laid street; and we are UNCOMMONLY partial TO DIRT.