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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    one seetliiug, foaming flood in deep -well or pit, and stirred and churned into a potential virulence by a powerful pumping process, could not fail, despite all local precautions possible, to impregnate tie surrounding atmosphere with a fetid miasma—a neighbourhood, it is needless to remark, where nothing is more desirable than that the air should be sweet and pure, not only on account of the denizens of the locality, but also of the court-houses situated there. It will not be diflicult to see that the foregoing objections apply with still greater force to the pumping station at Pollokshields, where the whole of the fetid flood is concentrated. Wells or reservoirs more numerous and cajjacious must be provided, and a much more powerful pumping process put in operation • the whole reeking volume lifted to a higher elevation, and a greater cleaning and scouring out of these wells or reservoirs entailed. And it is most observable, that it is actually proposed to clean them out into the river, and so to discharge into it at frequent intervals large volumes of foul sedimentary accumulations, only to be drifted up and down the channel by flow and ebb of tides, as now and heretofore—vide Messrs. Bateman & Bazalgette's charts—and not only so, but aggravated by the downflow of the like discharges from the pumping station at the Green ! Yerily our poor afflicted river, and still more grievously afflicted and burdened citizens, would have little to boast of in return for the enormous expenditure the scheme embraced in Messrs. Bateman & Bazalgette's report proposes. It is also strange—and no one who has read the report can have failed to notice the anomaly— that while the rural residences on the lower part of the river are the subjects of the reporters' solicitude, those at Pollokshields are treated as of no more account than the hovels in Saltmarket and Bridgegate. At page 22 of their report, Messrs. Bateman & Bazalgette say, '/ That all attempts at deodorization or precipitation on a large scale have hitherto failed, and curtly dismiss all idea of entertaining any such process. But it does not by any means follow that such processes are impossibili- ties, and that attempts at them must always, per se, fail. After making that statement, these eminent engineers proceed to detail the grand features of their own scheme, which is simply, as formerly noticed, spreading the sewage for absorption on the Ayrshire sands; and describe with much clearness the perfect purity of the sewage water after it shall have undergone filtration, ©ne cannot help here remarking, that if there be such perfect identitj^of-the-purified sewage water, as at Croydon, and the Loch Katrine water, as appeared to two of the distinguished reporters—one of them mistaking the purified Croydon for the Loch Katrine—might not our purified sewage water be impounded on the Ayrshire sands and sold to the good people of Irvine, Troon, and Salt- coats, as a most excellent drinking water 1 Or if these people should be so foolish as to refuse the precious boon, why not return it to the city by another pumping process and system of conduits, for sale and distribution to our ill-used print and dye works. At all events, the authori- ties and inhabitants of these contiguous Ayrshire towns—assuming the scheme carried out—will not object to, ought rather to rejoice in, the prospective increased pellucid character of the waters that wash their healthful shores ! But—merely to pursue the argument before leaving it—supposing the