Construction of the London Sewerage System: The Role of Joseph William Bazalgette (Research Paper Sample)

Construction of the London Sewerage System: The Role of Joseph William Bazalgette
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Construction of the London Sewerage System: The Role of Joseph William Bazalgette
Introduction
Joseph William Bazalgette was a well-regarded chief engineer who planned and oversaw the construction of the main London drainage system, huge embankments along river Thames, and several new parks and streets for the swarming capital. The London sewerage system constitutes part of the water infrastructural network serving the city. The current system was built in the late nineteenth century and was consequently expanded as the city of London grew. Thames Water currently operates the system, which serves nearly the entire London. Until the early nineteenth century, the waters of London’s River Thames were relatively clean. Some two centuries before this, Christopher Wren discovered that sewage and drainage disposal would eventually prove a key problem for the expanding city. He came up with a design for a sewerage system. However, city officials failed to implement this plan, and his successive works concentrated on prestigious buildings such as the St Paul’s Cathedral, instead of drainage engineering and architecture. The early nineteenth century witnessed little constancy with regard to sewage disposal in various districts of the London metropolis. The use of cesspits as receptacles for house drainage was very widespread. Nonetheless, the situation changed suddenly, and in the 1840s, draining houses into sewers became mandatory. All of these sewers drained directly into the Thames. Within seven years, the authorities had abolished more than thirty-thousand cesspits, effectively diverting all the household and street waste into the river. This drainage of waste into the Thames led to the contamination of the running water, which necessitated extensive works to discharge effluent effectively and promote accessibility of clean and safe water.
The Great Stink
The chaotic state of the city’s administration aggravated all endeavor to rectify the escalating crisis of sewage in the London metropolitan area. During the early nineteenth century, there were about eight Commissioners for Sewers. Each of these commissioners was in charge of their own districts. On top of typhoid fever, England recorded over forty-thousand cases of cholera out of a population of about 1.7 million in 1832. Because of these unfortunate happenings, the newly formed Poor Law Commission, under the leadership of Edwin Chadwick, published a report on the sanitary situation of the inhabitants of Great Britain in 1842. The report determined the cause of the infections as unhygienic drinking water. In 1847, stimulated by Chadwick’s report, the newly established Metropolitan Commission for Sewers did a study of both underground and aerial sanitary arrangement for the London metropolis. However, there was still no cohesive authority at this time. Among the outcomes of this study was the abolition of the use of cesspits and the incorporation of flushing mechanisms, which conveyed their untreated content into the Thames. While the abolition of the cesspits was a step towards the right direction, the subsequent systems still discharged untreated sewage into the Thames, negating all previous attempts to improve sanitation. Because the city continued to draw its drinking water from the Thames, cholera and typhoid fever became two major plagues of Victorian London. During the period between 1848 and 1849, fatalities from cholera related ailments in south London stood at 1.3 for every one thousand inhabitants. This was much higher in comparison to the cleaner upstream sections of the Thames, which recorded mortality rates of 0.37 deaths per thousand inhabitants.
In 1834, nearly two decades before the exposition of this condition, a renowned painter of biblical episodes and disasters, named John Martin, had suggested the construction of two cut-off sewers underneath the banks of River Thames. In his plan, the cut-off was to terminate at the Surrey Canal to the south and at the Tower to the north. Two vast receptacles were to be constructed, to transform the sludge into manure, and the seethe was to be incinerated by mammoth flames, therefore, supplementing the forced ventilation. This was a very brilliant proposal, even by the modern standards of technology. However, this system would have been more efficient if the designers had incorporated a mechanism for using the resultant heat energy to warm houses during the cold winter. In this manner, it would have been possible to use the waste as a resource to provide the much-needed heat during the winter season, thus providing a single solution to dual problems. Nonetheless, Cubitt and Stephenson presented a more official proposal for the construction of an intercepting sewer. Joseph Bazalgette noted this plan for future reference. The Great Stink, which occurred in 1858, proved to be the event that prompted the Victorian legislators to take action and ultimately adopt Bazalgette’s recommendations. During this time, a combination of an abnormally warm summer and an implausibly polluted Thames necessitated the hanging of sacks drenched in odorous chemicals at the skylights of England’s House of Commons.
The Solution
Because of the cholera of 1853, Joseph Bazalgette, who was the Chief Engineer working with the Metropolitan Commission for Sewers, drafted a report that essentially recommended a solution for the deteriorating situation. His plans, previously proposed by John Martin, a Victorian artist, included the construction of two massive intercepting sewers next to the Thames. These intercepting sewers would drain eastwards into sewerage treatment plants, eventually releasing clean deodorized water into the river. Even though there was no mechanism to finance a project of such magnitude at the time, the timing was nonetheless right due to the drainage and sanitation problems. Bazalgette was convinced that the drainage of London’s subjacent area was more imperative than the cleansing of the Thames. The condition of areas bordering old streams and rivers had become hazardous. The Victorian reformers had resolved to improve this squalid state of affairs. However, this condition persisted until 1856, when the Metropolitan Board of Works, or the MBW, succeeded the conservative system of self-possessed Commissioners of Sewers. Joseph Bazalgette, who was the Chief Engineer of the MBW, was tasked with designing and constructing a sewerage system to check any sewage within the London metropolis from seeping into the Thames or close to the Metropolis. Bazalgette’s mission involved the construction of cut-off sewers directly flanking the Thames and south and north of the river.
The purpose of the cut-off sewers was to collect sewage from drains and sewers, which had hitherto drained directly into the Thames. Prior to the commissioning of Bazalgette’s plan, the Thames-side in central London had no protective embankment and was characterized by mud, pebbles, and sewage that the ditches, outlets, and drains discharged. The MBW utilized this chance to commence the job of enclosing the Thames between masonry embankments. The notable works of Sir Joseph Bazalgette included London’s effective sewerage system, the Albert embankment to the south, and the Victoria embankment to the north. The erection of the sewers proved to be a momentous engineering feat. The period between 1856 and 1859 saw the construction of eighty-two miles of brick cut-off sewers below the streets of London, all of which flowed eastwards by gravity. These cut-off or intercepting sewers were linked to more than 450 miles of main sewer lines, which, in turn, received flow from 13,000 miles of smaller local sewerage systems. The smaller sewers handled close to 500,000 gallons of wastes daily. The construction of the interceptor system was an astounding mission involving copious amounts of concrete and mortar, millions of bricks, and the excavation of vast areas of the earth. Because the construction increased the demand for bricks, brick prices shot up by fifty percent. However, the choice of brick as the construction material appears to have been ill informed. The technology at the time precluded the use of huge pipes, which would have been faster to install and easy to maintain. The choice of culverts, which existed at the time, would have been better than the brick and mortar, which proved expensive in the end. Since the construction of the system occurred during the coldest winter and wettest summer of the nineteenth century, it was a great achievement, even for the Victorian engineers.
How the System Functioned
The two portions of the Main Drainage System, one to the north and another to the south of Thames, are largely similar. The theory upon which they operate is simple. In brief, they convey the sewage to London’s east, accumulates it until high tide before releasing. On both sides, three intercepting sewers constructed at varying levels diverts the sewage further from the Thames, and channels it either by gravity or by pumping towards the Thames outlet at Crossness on the south and Beckton on the north. At each outlet, enclosed reservoirs permit the storage of the sewage until high tide when it is released into the Thames on the outgoing tide. There were two locations for the main pumping stations. These were Crossness on the southern bank, and Abbey Mills, in the neighborhood of West Ham. The northern system starts from Old ford in the eastern neighborhoods through the Victorian embankments to Chiswick in the west. Sewers from the north of London also link to this system, merging at the northern outfall sewer. Pumping action at Abbey Mills lifts the sewage, from where it flows naturally to the Beckton res...