Schemes for the interception, conveyance, and utilisation of the sewage & drainage of Glasgow / by James Brown.

  • Brown, James.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Schemes for the interception, conveyance, and utilisation of the sewage & drainage of Glasgow / by James Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    i the foul discharges from these works, it is all but unnecessary to remark that, were there no other sources of pollution, they would render the waters of the Clyde noxious and offensive in no ordinary degree. Not to speak of offence and effluvia, they act as a direct and most effective prohibition to bathing at those places of usual resort for the purpose; and multitudes of our working men have now to go without the invig- orating and healthful plunge into the once pure waters of the Clyde, so much appreciated by ancestral Glasgow. Provision is indeed proposed by Messrs. Bateman & Bazalgette for intercepting and conveying away some six millions of gallons per day from public works; but this provision seems to be for only such works as are situated in the city proper, and the more immediately contiguous portions of the suburbs ; otherwise the provision is inadequate. And Avhile it is observed by these gentlemen, that any scheme by which the sewage shall be discharged into the Clyde at any point, unless it has pi-eviously undergone purification, is out of the question, the observation seems to have reference to the harbour only, and relates to the city sewage alone. It is further to be observed, that the schemes under review all but allow the several burns that intersect the city to remain in their present state—a diversion of a portion only of the waters of two of them being proposed by the eminent reporters just named. The fact is now a well ascertained one, that these burns—the arched portions of them—are pregnant sources of the febrile and choloraic diseases that so often fatally affect the public health. If they are even partially to continue the receptacles and conduits of all the rottenness, the filth and foulness, the putrid and nameless noxious matters that run and settle in them, deadly gases will infallibly continue to be generated in their respective courses. A mere diversion of a portion of the pointed waters of the Molindinar and Camlachie Burns, therefore, will leave the evil substantially un- touched ; and any scheme which does so, in whole or in part, utterly fails of a primary object. More than one of the schemes in question embrace the expedient of raising the sewage by pumping, with the necessary wells and reservoirs, to an elevation sufficient for conveyance or discharge, either over, or to higher levels than the city, by means of conduits within and around the city itself. To this the following remarks on the like proposal in Messrs. Bateman & Bazalgette's scheme sub- stantially apply. fit tve^f— A sewage pumping station at tlie«alfawt corner of the Green would, it is more than probable, evoke a hew and incenser ebidlition of popular hostility than anything of the kind yet experienced, and on popular grounds alone is highly objectionable. Being immediately contiguous to the junction of the two last named burns, it implies at least their partial diversion into two or more capacious reservoirs or wells, formed in the portion of the Green in question, and simply means the appropriation of the whole of the western part, from the line of Charlotte Street—an appropriation that would certainly evoke the most determined popular antagonism. Apart from the local nuisance which the cleaning out of these reservoirs woidd occasion—and that would be frequent enough—taking the partial volume of the two burns, with their well known ingredients, along with the whole sewage and drainage of the lower level of the city, poured into