The Protection of the Public Water Supply.—The great importance of an adequate and safe water supply is something which hardly requires a long argument. In the rural districts and in small villages the neighboring wells and springs may be utilized, but in large communities, especially those having numerous industries, a public supply must be provided. |How much water is needed?| It is customarily figured that large towns and cities require approximately and on the average one hundred gallons of water per capita every day in the year. Half-a-ton of water per day per person! What is done with it all? Not all of it, of course, is used for human consumption. By far the greater part is utilized for public, industrial, and general sanitary purposes. Sprinkling parks and lawns, putting out fires, flushing sewers—all these activities require large amounts of water. Factories, laundries, railroads, and other such establishments make heavy demands on the total supply. So does the modern sanitary equipment which is now being installed almost everywhere in hotels, stores, and houses. The amount of water required for human consumption is very small compared with the quantities used in these other ways.
The first essential of a satisfactory water supply, therefore, is that it be adequate, which means that large cities must often go a long distance in order to obtain water in sufficient quantities. |Sources of supply.| New York City derives a large part of its water from the Catskill Mountains; Los Angeles brings its entire supply from the Sierra Nevadas, more than two hundred and fifty miles away.[[256]] Many other cities obtain their water close at hand: Chicago, for example, draws from Lake Michigan, and Cleveland from Lake Erie. Adequacy, however, is not the only consideration. For use in the industries, water must be clear in color and not too hard. When it is turbid or hard, it has to be clarified and softened by storage and the use of chemicals. The relative purity of the water, its freedom from pollution, is the most important consideration of all.
The treatment of water for human use.
There are various ways of making sure that water is fit for human consumption. One way is to secure the supply from a source which is by nature free from pollution, from deep-driven wells or from mountain lakes which are above the level of probable contamination. Water supplies drawn from very large bodies of water, like the Great Lakes, are normally safe enough if the intake is set far out from shore, because the diluting power of these vast water areas is sufficient to render harmless even a considerable amount of pollution by sewage discharge. Where a water supply of sufficient natural purity cannot be had within reasonable distance the only safe plan is to subject the water to such length of storage, or to such mechanical or chemical treatment as will ensure its fitness for use. The storage of water in a reservoir, exposed to the light and air, will render it safe, under normal conditions. The length of time required for this purpose will depend, of course, upon the quality of the water which is put into the reservoir. A period of three months is ordinarily regarded as sufficient where the raw water has not been badly contaminated. The mechanical treatment of water is commonly known as filtration, and there are several forms of public water-filtration plants now in use by American cities. The simplest is the system of slow sand filters in which the water is treated by allowing it to percolate slowly through a bed of sand and crushed stone, thereby becoming rid of noxious bacteria. A more complicated method involves the use of rapid sand filters in which the raw water is forced through filterbeds of crushed stone under pressure.[[257]]
Smoke Abatement.—Pure air is another essential to the maintenance of the public health. Rural parts of the country encounter no difficulty on this score, but the larger cities are now finding it necessary to protect the air which their citizens have to breathe. In these days of smoke-belching industry, the very atmosphere of the large city is laden with a menace to health and cleanliness. An investigation made in New York some years ago disclosed the fact that sulphur dioxide (a poisonous gas) was being discharged into the air by the smokestacks and chimneys of the city at an appalling rate. The elementary student of chemistry can well testify that SO2 is not a substance that human beings thrive upon. And apart from the menace to health there is the heavy damage done by soot-laden atmosphere to the furnishings of houses and the contents of shops. Hence the agitation in the large cities for an abatement of this smoke nuisance and the establishment of regulations which now, in many places, require the use of mechanical smoke consumers by all large industries. The enforcement of this requirement is not at all difficult, because any violation is visible to the naked eye.
Overcrowding and disease.
The Housing of the People.—By the homes of a town or city you may judge its people. The proper housing of the population has a close relation to many things, but to none is this relation closer than to the public health. When the people are herded together in tenements, with dark and narrow hallways, with rooms badly ventilated and often without sunlight, we have a fertile soil for the spread of tuberculosis. More than ten thousand persons die each year in the tenement districts of New York City from the Great White Plague alone. The children who grow up in congested quarters, moreover, go out into the world handicapped in both body and soul. Their powers of resistance to disease are often seriously impaired by the crowding, poor ventilation, and lack of proper sanitary arrangements. An investigation of housing conditions made in New York City over twenty years ago led to the enactment of a comprehensive Tenement House Law (1901) in order to prevent overcrowding, and the main provisions of this law have since been copied by most of the larger cities of the country.[[258]]
Housing experiments abroad.
In some European cities, notably Glasgow and London, many municipal tenements have been erected. Crowded slums have been demolished and model houses, each accommodating one or more families, have been erected in their place by the use of public money. These tenements are then rented to workers at reasonable rates. This plan has not yet been tried on any large scale in the United States nor would it be likely to prove very satisfactory so long as city administration, in all its branches, is conducted so wastefully as it is in America today. During the World War, however, the federal government built many hundreds of workmen’s dwellings in different parts of the country, particularly in the neighborhood of the great shipbuilding plants. After the war they were sold to private buyers.
It is often urged that instead of building model tenements in crowded sections, the authorities of large cities ought to promote the growth of suburbs by giving them good transportation facilities, and by promptly supplying these suburban districts with sewers, water supply, gas, electricity, and paved roads. People who go to the suburbs not only have more room, but they are much more likely in the course of time, to own their homes. |The importance of owning a home.| Home-owning is a practice which ought to be encouraged, not only for reasons of health and recreation, but to steady the political temper of the people as well. The man who owns a piece of the earth’s surface, with a house on it that he calls his home, is not often a believer in violence or revolution. A great deal of honest sentiment clusters about the American home, but very little can ever attach to three or four rooms in a tenement house.