The Big Necessity (38 page)

The cesspool emptying fee
Steven Johnson,
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London
(London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 10.

Tudor environmental health inspectors
The sewer commissioners were commanded, among other things, “to reform, repair, and amend the said walls, ditches, banks, gutters, sewers, gotes, calcies, bridges, streams and other the premises, in all places needful.” From “The Bill of Sewers with a new proviso, etc,” 1531, in Danby Pickering,
The Statutes at Large from the First year of Richard III to the 31st Year of K. Henry VIII, inclusive
(Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, 1763), p. 223.

Sewer derives from seaward
Mary Gayman, “A Glimpse into London's Early Sewers,”
Cleaner
, March 2006.

The 3,700-year-old palace of King Minos
International Water Association (IWA), “Sanitation 21: Simple Solutions for Complex Sanitation” (London: IWA, 2006), p. 12.

The everyday sanitary conveniences of Minoan Crete
Virginia Smith,
Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 6.

A large city sewer cleaned by prisoners of war
Caroline Schönning, “Urine Diversion—Hygienic Risks and Microbial Guidelines for Re-use,” background paper for
WHO Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wastewater, Graywater, and Excreta
(Geneva: World Health Organization, 2006), p. 30.

The Thames is now made a great cesspool
House of Commons, “Report from the Select Committee on Improvement of the Health of Towns, Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index. Effect of Interment of Bodies in Towns.” Ordered to Be Printed, 14 June 1842 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970), q. 3452, pp. 209–10.

14,000 died in London alone
Halliday,
The Great Stink of London
, p. 124.

What health is
Henry Mayhew, letter to the
Morning Chronicle
, September 24, 1849.

In modern money
The economists Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, who run the website
http://www.measuringworth.com
, from which these calculations are taken, set out various criteria for translating expenditure from one period to another. The lower figure of £3 billion comes from a calculation made using the retail price index; the higher figure from GDP. The modern worth dates to 2006.

£6 million to remove fat
Personal communication with Rob Smith, September 2006.

Many sewers will be 250 years old
Kirsty Scott, “The Dirty Bomb Beneath Our Feet,”
Guardian
, September 23, 2003.

6,000 homeowners
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, “Out of Sight—Not Out of Mind: Ofwat and the Public Sewer Network in England and Wales,” Thirtieth Report of Session 2003–2004 (London: The Stationery Office Ltd., 2004), p. 3.

Unintended sewage pond feature
Sonia Young was awarded £6,000 in damages from South West Water to compensate her for seven years of cleaning up “the toxic, smelly and very sad stream.” “Compensation Award for Seven Years ‘Sewage Hell,'”
Cornishman
, February 7, 2008.

Sewage which reached her knees
Laura Matless, “Mother and Baby Flee from Foul Flood Waters,”
Bath Chronicle
, October 14, 2005.

Sewage backed up once a year
Opinions of the Lords of Appeal for Judgement in the cause Marcic (Respondent) v. Thames Water Utilities (Appellants), [2003] UKHL 66,
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldjudgmt/jd031204/marcic-1.htm
.

Sewerage undertakers
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts,
Out of Sight—Not Out of Mind
, Ev. 2.

Bonuses totaling £1.26 million
Martin Horwood MP,
Parliamentary Debates
, Westminster Hall, June 27, 2006.

One of the most unpleasant events
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, “Out of Sight—Not Out of Mind,” Ev. 2.

D minus
American Society for Civil Engineers, “Report Card for America's Infrastructure 2005,”
http://www.asce.org/reportcard
.

Crumbling, dangerous sewer pipes
NRDC, “Swimming in Sewage,” p. 23.

2,175 Olympic-sized swimming pools
David Hsu, “Sustainable New York City” (New York: Design Trust for Public Space and New York City Office for Environmental Coordination, 2006), p. 21.

1.46 trillion gallons
U.S. EPA, “Implementation and Enforcement of the Combined Sewer Overflow Control Policy, Report to Congress,” U.S. EPA 833-R-01-003, December 2001, pp. 7–15.

1.75 inches of rain per hour
Personal communication with Douglas Greeley, September 2007.

3.5 inches of rain
Ibid.

A design issue
Associated Press, “Intense rain storm cripples NYC mass transit system, leaving thousands without a way to work,” August 9, 2007.

Buried beneath our feet
NRDC, “Swimming in Sewage,” p. v.

The depressing attitude
House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, “Corporate Environmental Crime, Second Report of Session 2004–5” (London: Stationery Office Ltd., 2005), p. 3.

A £2 billion interceptor stormwater tunnel
“New Tunnel to Give London a 21st-Century River Thames,” Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs news release, March 22, 2007.

Frighten a lady into asterisks
Henry Mayhew, 1851,
London Labour and the London Poor
, p. 431.

A Haitian immigrant
Marie Brenner, “Incident in the 70th Precinct,”
Vanity Fair
, December 1997.

The contribution of sewer workers
Recently, scientists have been using “sewage epidemiology” to estimate levels of drug use. At Italy's Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, researchers tested sewage samples from Milan, London, and Lugano, Switzerland, for cocaine, opiates, cannabis, and amphetamines. Findings included the fact that 40,000 doses of cocaine are taken daily in Milan, far above the previous estimate of 15,000. Though sewage epidemiology can be tricky—it requires assuming the size of an average dose to how many people pee to how far the sewage has traveled—the technique is thought to be more reliable than surveys, the usual tools for calculating drug abuse. People lie; their sewage doesn't. Ettore Zuccato et al., “Estimating Community Drug Abuse by Wastewater Analysis,”
Environmental Health Perspectives EHP-in-press
, May 1, 2008, posted online at
http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2008/11022/abstract.html
.

$5.3 million settlement
The full settlement of $8.7 million was reduced to $5.3 million after legal fees. “Victim, Civil Rights Leader Look Back on Infamous NYPD Torture Case,”
International Herald Tribune
, August 9, 2007.

Natural percolation of water
Two years of monitoring Seattle's SEA streets concluded that the volume of storm water leaving the street had been reduced by 99 percent. More information is available from
http://www.seattle.gov
.
See also Naomi Lubick, “Using Nature's Design to Stem Urban Storm-Water Problems,”
Environmental Science and Technology
40/19 (October 1, 2006): 5832–33.

Twenty-two Hyde Parks
Gravel, porous bricks, or paving are exempt from the new requirement. Rebecca Smithers, “New Rules for Front Gardens to Fight Floods,”
Guardian
, February 8, 2008.

Roosevelt said
Not only did Roosevelt dare to bring up the topic of sewage and water conservation before the businessmen of Buffalo, some of whom had interests in Niagara water power, but he did it at a 6
A.M
. breakfast appointment. “Roosevelt Stirs Middle West Again; Crowds from Buffalo to Chicago Cheer Attacks on Corporate and Private Dishonesty,”
New York Times
, August 26, 1910.

The Art of Drainage
Joseph Bazalgette may be relatively obscure, but at least he has a Wikipedia entry; George. E. Waring, an equally innovative, daring, and determined engineer, does not. George E. Waring,
Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health
(orig. pub. New York: E. Judd & Co., 1867; Ebook 19465, Project Gutenberg, October 4, 2006), p. 230.

2. JAPAN'S TOILET REVOLUTION

The best lavatories
Adam Hart-Davis,
Thunder, Flush and Thomas Crapper: An Encycloopedia
(London: Michael O'Mara Books, 1997), 26.

Two dozen or so a year
Ibid., p. 48.

Fire and the wheel
The top five inventions of all time were, in order, the toilet, the computer, the printing press, fire, and the wheel.
Focus
, May 1997, pp. 68–76.

A presence in sixteen countries
All TOTO figures are from TOTO annual report 2006, available at
http://www.toto.co.jp/en/
.

A tiny proportion was sewered
Even in 1961, only 6 percent of the population was sewered.
Making Great Breakthroughs: All about the Sewage Works in Japan
(Tokyo: Japan Sewage Works Association, 2002), p. 7.

More Japanese were sitting than squatting
Takushi Ohno, “Bowled Over by Toilet's Evolution into High-Tech Gizmo,”
Asahi Shimbun
, December 8, 2005.

Toilet Ho!
Heisei Kawaya Kenkyukai and Minoru Sato,
Toilet de HO
(Tokyo: TOTO Publishing, 1995).

A vicious libel
Alexander Kira,
The Bathroom
(New York: Viking Press, 1966, 1976), p. 25.

She had never seen the Prophet
Abdul Fattah Al-Husseini Al-Sheikh, “Water and Sanitation in Islam,” WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, 1996.

Their fecally stained pants
Dr. Cameron surveyed 940 men in Oxfordshire, of whom 43.8 percent showed fecal contamination of their underpants; 8.6 percent were not accustomed to wearing underpants at all. Dr. Cameron was diligent in reporting his findings to the participants, writing, “I decided there was no point in this survey unless I mentioned to those involved that they showed a lack of hygiene in this particular regard. It was naturally a delicate matter to handle, and the answers varied between a truculent ‘mind your own business' attitude and a host of excuses such as sweating, long journeys, bicycle riding, ‘nervous diarrhea' and hemorrhoids.” Under “Possible Remedial Measures,” he suggested that laundries adopt a less tolerant attitude; hygiene education; a preparedness to tackle an unsavory matter with the offenders whenever this is brought to light; and more bidets. J. A. Cameron, “A Particular Problem Regarding Personal Cleanliness,”
Public Health
76 (1972): 173–77.

Grazing the wings of butterflies
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, “One Thing and Another on the Privy,”
Postcolonial Studies
5/2 (2002): 147–51.

Kin no Unko (Golden Poo)
Alice Gordenker, “So What the Heck Is That?”
Japan Times
, March 20, 2007.

23 percent of Japanese houses
Kazuo Mikami, “Promising an ‘Evolution' in Toilet Culture,”
Japan Times
, May 14, 2007.

Complex and ridiculous thrones
Alan Watts,
In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915–1965
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 33–35.

The American toilet
U.S. EPA, “How to Conserve Water and Use It Effectively,” from
http://www.epa.gov/nps/chap3.html
.

One cross-border black marketeer
CNN, transcript 00052100V55, May 21, 2000.

Get the federal government out of the bathroom
Joe Knollenberg, “Federal Government Has No Business in Your Bathroom,”
Environment & Climate News
, December 1, 1999.

Plumber's smudge
Wallace Reyburn,
Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper
(London: Macdonald and Company, 1969), p. 17.

Ranked first, second, and third
NAHB Research Center, Water Closet Performance Testing, September 2002,
www.cuwcc.org/toilet_fixtures/NAHB_ToiletReport_Sept-2002.pdf
.

An average bowel movement
J. B. Wyman, K. W. Heaton, A. P. Manning, and A. C. Wicks, “Variability of Colonic Function in Healthy Subjects,”
Gut
19 (1978): 146–50.

Veritec's MaP Maximum Performance (MaP) Testing of Popular Toilet Models
(MaP) reports available from
http://www.veritec.ca
.

Clean Is Happy Campaign
http://www.cleanishappy.com
.

The most significant innovation for personal hygiene
American Bidet Company,
http://www.bidet.com
.

Now it's 10 percent
Adam Sage, “French Home Keeps Children Away,” (London)
Times
, March 16, 2005.

The little bathroom for the feet
Harvey A. Levenstein,
We'll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 31, quoting Jan Gelb's diary, July 13, 1929.

Highly charged emotionally
Kira,
The Bathroom
, p. 23.

French and therefore louche
Personal communication with Harvey Molotch, August 2007. See also Harvey Molotch,
Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars and Computers Come to Be As They Are
(New York: Routledge, 2005).

Its bidet model “Carmen”
Kira,
The Bathroom
, p. 23.

A freakish bathroom custom
“On the Down-Low,”
Harper's Magazine
, August 2005.

Close your eyes and seek God
Dareh Gregorian and Kathianne Boniello, “The Bums' Rush,”
New York Post
, July 31, 2007.

Ask for Hakle “Verlangen Sie eine Rolle Hakle
^®
, dann brauchen Sie nicht Toilettenpapier zu sagen!”
http://www.hakle.de/about_history.asp
.