The Big Necessity (5 page)

The Victorian century gave us many wondrous things, but one of my favorites is the now-lapsed vocation of
sanitarian
, a word taken by men who occupied themselves with the new discipline of “public health.” The most famous was Edwin Chadwick, a difficult character who left a legacy of reforms that were magnificent—the 1848 Public Health Act, for one—but also mistaken and deadly. In Chadwick's landmark 1842
Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain
, a Victorian bestseller, he condemned the filth in which
working classes were forced to live, its effects on their health, and the consequent losses to the economy. (Henry Mayhew, in a letter to the
Morning Chronicle
, wrote of meeting a woman in cholera-ridden Bermondsey who said simply, “Neither I nor my children know what health is.”)

Chadwick decided the solution was to organize and expand the sewer system, but to use it for
sewage
—a word newly invented—and to discharge the sewage into the Thames. It might hurt the river, he reasoned, but it would save people's health. Sewers were built and did as he said they would. And the Thames ran browner and thicker, and people drank it, and cholera loved it. There were fulminations against filth in newspapers and Parliament, but nothing was done. The medical establishment, in these pre-Pasteur times, was still convinced that disease was spread by contagion via miasmas, or bad air.

It took a long dry summer to force change, and because of the foulness of the air, not of the water. In 1858, the weather and the sewage-filled Thames came together disastrously to form the “Great Stink,” when the river reeked so awfully that the drapes on the waterfront windows of the Houses of Parliament were doused with chloride to mask the smell. Politicians debated with their noses covered by handkerchiefs. After prevaricating for years, parliamentarians debated for only ten days before signing into law the Metropolis Local Management Act, which set up a Metropolitan Board of Works to sort out the “Main Drainage of the Metropolis.”

Joseph Bazalgette was the board's chief engineer. He was a small man with excessive energy. His plan was grand: enormous main sewers would run parallel to the river on upper, middle, and lower levels. They would be fed by a vast network of smaller sewers, and the whole flow would be conducted by gravity and sometimes by pumps (London is partly low-lying) to two discharge points, Barking and Crossness, in London's eastern reaches. There, the city's sewage would continue to be dumped into the river, but suitably far from human habitation. Dilution, as the engineer's mantra still goes, would take care of pollution. Construction lasted nearly twenty years. By then, Bazalgette had used 318 million bricks, driven the price of bricks up 50 percent and spent £4 million, an enormous sum (£6 billion in modern money). He had
also built the Victoria Embankment along the way, reclaiming land from the river near Westminster and running a sewer through it. For all this, as Stephen Halliday writes in
The Great Stink of London
, he should be considered the greatest sanitarian of all. His sewers may have saved more lives than any other public works. Yet his efforts have only been rewarded with a small plaque on his embankment, a mural in some nearby public bathrooms, and two streets named after him in the far-off London suburb of New Malden. There is no statue or public thoroughfare celebrating his Main Drainage of the Metropolis, though Bazalgette arguably did more than Brunel to shape modern life.

 

The flushers love Bazalgette, and particularly because he built his sewer network with 25 percent extra capacity to allow for population growth. But they have more pressing thoughts than their hero's cultural legacy. However ingenious Bazalgette's design was, a system built for 3 million must now cope with the excreta and effluent of 13 million people and hundreds of thousands of industries. Bazalgette couldn't imagine there would be so many houses, with so many toilets using so much water. That this much can be thrown away, when it needn't be. He certainly didn't account for sewers that take everything out being defeated by takeout of another sort.

There is a mid-level sewer that requires inspection. A nearby park is genteel in darkness, and there is beauty down the manhole, too, in the form of a spiral brick staircase, glistening with damp and other things best not inquired into. “This is an original Bazalgette,” says one of the two men preceding me. Then he stops dead.

“Fat.”

Fat?

“Here, look.”

The stairs are stuffed with blocks of solid, congealed fat. The industry term is FOG, for Fat, Oil, and Grease. Flushers hate it even more than Q-tips. Faced with this degree of FOG there is only defeat and retreat. Up above, Dave the flusher lets rip. “Fat! It costs millions to clean up. Restaurants pour it down the drains, it solidifies and it blocks the sewers.” They used to use road drills to remove it, he says—“big
RD-9 jobs!”—until new health and safety regulations came into force, and jobs that had been done for years were judged now to be too dangerous. Flushers still talk of the Leicester Square fat blockage which took three months to remove. Once, Dave's gang was hammering away at a whole wall of FOG, and another gang was doing the same at the other end, until the wall started shifting and nearly squashed the gang on the other side.

Flushers are phlegmatic about feces or toilet paper or condoms. But they hate fat. “That's what smells,” says Dave. “Not shit. Fat gets into your pores. You get out and you have a shower at the depot and you smell fine, then you get home and you smell again.” They grimace. “Disgusting stuff.” It is also expensive stuff. Half of the 100,000 blockages every year in London are caused by it. It costs at least £6 million a year to remove. “Contractors do it now,” says a flusher, before muttering “or they don't, more like.” High-pressure hoses flush out some blockages. Thames Water has been trying out robot fat removers and already uses remotely operated cameras to see what's what, but for now the best weapons against an unceasing and superior enemy are water, force, and curses. Prevention would be better. Restaurants are supposed to have fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to get collected fat carted away, so many restaurants dispose of it down the sewer instead. Leicester Square's restaurants are no more responsible than Victorian London's cesspool owners were. Who's going to find out? Most sewers are only visited when something goes wrong, and monitoring is light. Sewer workers are firefighters: they respond to crisis. In most areas of the UK, only 20 percent of sewers are inspected regularly, and by the end of this century, many of the UK's 186,000 miles of sewers will be 250 years old. They may be in pretty good condition, but sometimes they don't work.

In an average year in the UK, 6,000 homeowners find sewage has backed up into their houses or gardens. Consider for example the troubles of Sonia Young, who spent 100 days cleaning her garden of its unintended sewage pond feature, or new mum Elizabeth Powell in Bath, forced to escape upstairs with her two-week-old baby from a flood of sewage that reached her knees. In 2003, the Court of Appeal at the House of Lords, the UK's highest-level judiciary body, heard the case of
Peter Marcic, resident of Old Church Lane in the London suburb of Stanmore. Between 1993 and 1996, Marcic found sewage backed up in his garden once a year. It happened again—twice in 1997, not once in 1998, four times in 1999, and five times in 2000. During the hearings, the Lords seemed shocked by several things: that a modern-day wastewater treatment infrastructure can still spew sewage into a residential home, and that it is considered normal. That “sewerage undertakers,” as the water utilities are known, are only obliged to compensate the homeowner for the cost of his annual sewerage rates, usually around £125. That insurance companies, faced with costs of between £15,000 and £30,000 per sewer flooding incident, sometimes refuse to pay up. Under the 1875 Public Health Act, still in force, local authorities are obliged to make “such sewers as may be necessary for effectually draining their district.” “Effectually” is vague enough to leave room for loopholes and to get out of infrastructural upgrades. In some ways, this is understandable, as water utilities get no extra public subsidy for infrastructure costs and must pay for them out of water and sewer rates, but any rise in bills unfailingly causes public outrage. (A few months after raising water bills by 21 percent in 2005, Thames Water's four directors were awarded bonuses totaling £1.26 million, a rise of 62 percent from the previous year.)

A 2004 parliamentary committee was appalled by testimony from water industry officials about sewage backups. “Would you say,” inquired a committee member of the head of England and Wales's water regulators Ofwat, “that sewage ending up in your living room is about the worst service failure that can happen to anybody?” The man from Ofwat had to agree. “Short of threats to life and limb and health,” he admitted, “it is one of the most unpleasant events that can happen to any household.”

Bazalgette's sewers may have saved London from cholera and made miracles out of brick and water, but even he couldn't defeat decay, pinched resources, and a failure to upgrade. “If Bazalgette hadn't built his sewers when he did,” Rob Smith tells me, “we would—literally—be in the shit today.” If Bazalgette's sewers aren't maintained, we will be again.

_______

 

It's a hot afternoon in Queens, New York, and for the first and probably last time in my life, I am stopping traffic, with the assistance of half a dozen fit young men and four large trucks belonging to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The men have been asked to show me a regulator sewer, a visit that took months of begging to arrange. The process began with a redoubtable woman in the DEP press office who declared that there was no way I'd ever get into the city's sewers, and did I know how many people phoned her to ask the same question? But the redoubtable woman could be bypassed, and the bypass ended up in the office of Deputy Commissioner Douglas Greeley, an affable man with a hell of a job, because he is in charge of New York's fourteen wastewater treatment plants (London, by contrast, has three).

When I'd called him from London to arrange the appointment, he'd been helpful but doubtful. “You'll have to do several hours of close confinement training. Then you'll need to get a security check.” Then he said “9/11!” as if he didn't need to say more. Precaution is understandable and probably overdue: terrorist attacks on drinking water supplies are usually planned for, but not on sewage facilities. (When an employee at a Washington, D.C., treatment plant showed me the railway trucks that until recently took liquid chloride down to the river to purify the effluent, he said, “We really dodged a bullet there. Any terrorist could have blown up those trucks and killed ten thousand people. Luckily, terrorists are stupid.”) Sewers have always had security issues: Leon Trotsky ordered Moscow's sewers to be checked for opponents with bad intentions. The most sensitive sewers in London—which Rob Smith won't identify on a map, but which definitely include one running under Buckingham Palace—have sensors linked to police stations, so that flushers doing a job below who haven't alerted the right control center risk emerging to find several gun barrels pointing in their upcoming direction.

Eventually, vetting was deemed done, my time spent in London's sewers counted as close confinement training, and Greeley passed me
on to “a happy Irishman who will look after you.” The happy Irishman is in charge of Collections North, a department with a dull name and an important job—important because they keep the pumping stations and tide gates working. Pumping stations pump up the flow when gravity isn't enough, or when gravity is going in the wrong direction. Some are three stories deep. The tide gates date from the days when sewers—wooden pipes back then—ran under the piers where ocean liners docked. Tide-gate discharges—outfalls—were accepted for decades, Greeley tells me, “until passengers thought the smell was too great when they were getting off the boat. People would go to the beach and there would be something like black mayonnaise all over it, and it was like a horror show.”

Greeley has shelves full of water and sanitation books in his office, a piece of original wooden water pipe mounted on his wall, and a lively interest in New York water history, clean and foul. He can and does talk about it for hours. He explains that sewer construction was slower than London's and more piecemeal. In the nineteenth century, each of the five New York boroughs had autonomy and a president. Each president got around to sewer construction when he felt like it. It wasn't considered urgent. There was no Great Stink to focus priorities. Drinking water was a different matter. “They were thinking, damn the economics of it, we're going to build for a hundred and something years from now. That thinking went into our older structures, the reservoirs, the aqueducts. The water system was built for the ages. The sewer system, on the other hand? ‘Only do what we have to.'”

Manhattan's and Brooklyn's sewers were rationally laid out, thanks to a sewerage commission that traveled to Europe to learn from Hamburg (the first European city to lay modern sewers) and London. Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx fared worse. “They used to be farms. By the time they opened up, the city couldn't catch up. It was always anticipated that the city would be able to catch up, but that was sixty years ago.” Greeley says his sewers are also in quite good condition, as they are regularly sprayed with concrete, which helps prevent wear and tear. That's not to say that the DEP couldn't do with more money for upgrades. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation's infrastructure every few years. In 2000, wastewater infrastructure got
a D. By 2005, it was a D-minus. In 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that a quarter of the nation's sewer pipes were in poor or very poor condition. By 2020, the proportion of crumbling, dangerous sewer pipes will be 50 percent.