Address, “Disposition of Sewage”
Dr. Ashley—The universal aim of every one is to succeed. Success in anything depends, it is aptly said, on one’s ability, reliability, endurance, and action—four personal requisites, the absence of any one of which means failure. Ability and reliability are personal qualities, while endurance and action, two of these four requisites, are physical endowments dependable on one’s health. Accepting these statements as correct, then half of our successes is dependable on personal health and one-half on personal quality.
If man’s successes are equally as dependable on health as on his mental or acquired qualities or abilities, then we must draw but one conclusion, viz., that as much attention should be given to the maintenance of a healthy body as to the use and maintenance of our mental and moral capabilities.
Healthfulness depends in part on cleanliness, the state or quality of being clean. Health is natural. Disease is unnatural and is the result of some known or unknown transgression of natural laws. Dirt and disease have always been good friends. Disease is always most flourishing when it has dirt and filth for company; and to be dirty or filthy is to transgress nature’s efforts at keeping the body well.
Water and food are essential to life. Consume them and the liquid waste produce is sewage filth. To man the foulest and most repulsive dirt or filth is that of his own daily making, and well that it is, for it contains the most poisonous substances that exist and civilized humanity everywhere is increasingly directing its efforts to accomplish its destruction in the most sanitary and economical way possible. Modern methods employed by cities or lesser municipalities to disposal of their liquid filth is that of establishing systems of underground drains called sewers, into which such liquid filth is discharged.
The first well designed sewerage system to be adopted in the United States was built in Chicago about the year 1855.
The modern water-closet was not evolved until early in the last century, and in consequence of which evolution water carriage as a means of conveying sewage away logically followed its introduction. Former designs of sewerage provided for drains that would accommodate both the storm waters as well as the sewage. This method is commonly known as the “Combined System,” but when the employment of this character of sewage disposal created nuisances, the demand arose for the abatement of said nuisances, and it was then that civilization faced sewage purification in some form as a remedy. Storm waters are only dirty waters and not, strictly speaking, polluted waters, for merely dirty water will not create an offensive nuisance and requires no purification, while polluted water does. So the “separate system” of sewers was then evolved, namely, where one system conveys the storm waters and a separate system the sanitary sewage, for, inasmuch as only sanitary sewage needs purifying, therefore works of smaller capacity are needed than would be required were the large and unsteady volume of storm waters to be also subjected to the purifying process.
Many experiments have been made and varying forms of sewage purifying plants have been built during the last half century, and out of the many failures there have been evolved a few processes of purification which have proven fairly successful, but from an economic standpoint as well as from a physical one much yet has to be gained.
The broad irrigation of land with raw or crude sewage has been tried out and its limitations discovered. Although physically successful when properly administered, this form of disposal has been found to be expensive. Existing costly land values are usually exceedingly against the adoption of this form of disposal. The Broad Irrigation Plant of Berlin, Germany, with her 43,000 acres of land, is a notable example of the continuance of this form of disposal, but while this scheme has through its years of usefulness sometimes shown profits and sometimes deficits, the profits have never been large enough to pay the interest and sinking fund charges on the capital expended on the purchase of farms.
The method of purification now in general use is what is broadly called the biological method, wherein nature’s own mysterious forces, viz., putrefaction and nitrification, are encouraged usually by first impounding the sewage and then nitrifying the impounded liquid in a filter bed, so called.