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Read Ebook: The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book by Crane Walter Illustrator
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Ebook has 39 lines and 4378 words, and 1 pages
Page.
Introduction 3
Plans and advice 3
Sewage, sewers, and sewerage defined 4
Nature and quantity of sewage 4
Sewage-borne diseases and their avoidance 5
How sewage decomposes 9
Importance of air in treatment of sewage 10
Practical utilities 11
Kitchen-Sink Drainage 26
Cesspools 26
Septic tanks 28
Grease traps 53
General procedure 55
INTRODUCTION.
The main purpose of home-sewerage works is to get rid of sewage in such way as to guard against the transmission of disease germs through drinking water, flies, or other means; to avoid creating nuisance. What is the best method and what the best outfit are questions not to be answered offhand from afar. A treatment that is a success in one location may be a failure in another. In every instance decision should be based upon field data and full knowledge of the local needs and conditions. An installation planned from assumed conditions may work harm. The householder may be misled as to the purification and rely on a protection that is not real. He may anticipate little or no odor and find a nuisance has been created.
PLANS AND ADVICE.
Though specific plans can not be sent in the absence of definite information, and though plans and specifications can not be prepared to meet individual requirements, the Division of Agricultural Engineering, Bureau of Public Roads, gladly gives such help as is possible. To those who contemplate installing sewerage works on farms and who furnish the information outlined under the caption "Field data," on page 52, plans, advice, or suggestions will be sent. Local requirements are frequently met or approximated by one of the designs on hand; working drawings in the form of blue prints will then be furnished. Sometimes the designs, slightly modified, may suit the needs. In other instances it is sufficient to send published bulletins or give written suggestions of a practical nature.
SEWAGE, SEWERS, AND SEWERAGE DEFINED.
Human excrements as found in closets and privy vaults are known as night soil. These wastes may be flushed away with running water, and there may be added the discharges from washbasins, bathtubs, kitchen and slop sinks, laundry trays, washing vats, and floor drains. This refuse liquid product is sewage, and the underground pipe which conveys it is a sewer. Since sewers carry foul matter they should be water-tight, and this feature of their construction distinguishes them from drains removing relatively pure surface or ground water. Sewerage refers to a system of sewers, including the pipes, tanks, disposal works, and appurtenances.
NATURE AND QUANTITY OF SEWAGE.
Under average conditions a man discharges daily about 3-1/2 ounces of moist feces and 40 ounces of urine, the total in a year approximating 992 pounds. Feces consist largely of water and undigested or partially digested food; by weight it is 77.2 per cent water. 2 Urine is about 96.3 per cent water.
Practical Physiological Chemistry, by Philip B. Hawk, 1916, pp. 221, 359.
Agriculture, by F. H. Storer, 1894, vol. 2, p. 70.
The excrements constitute but a small part of ordinary sewage. In addition to the excrements and the daily water consumption of perhaps 40 gallons per person are many substances entering into the economy of the household, such as grease, fats, milk, bits of food, meat, fruit, and vegetables, tea and coffee grounds, paper, etc. This complex product contains mineral, vegetable, and animal substances, both dissolved and undissolved. It contains dead organic matter and living organisms in the form of exceedingly minute vegetative cells and animal cells . These low forms of life are the active agents in destroying dead organic matter.
The bacteria are numbered in billions and include many species, some useful and others harmful. They may be termed tiny scavengers, which under favorable conditions multiply with great rapidity, their useful work being the oxidizing and nitrifying of dissolved organic matter and the breaking down of complex organic solids to liquids and gases. Among the myriads of bacteria are many of a virulent nature. These at any time may include species which are the cause of well-known infections and parasitic diseases.
SEWAGE-BORNE DISEASES AND THEIR AVOIDANCE.
Any spittoon, slop pail, sink drain, urinal, privy, cesspool, sewage tank, or sewage distribution field is a potential danger. A bit of spit, urine, or feces the size of a pin head may contain many hundred germs, all invisible to the naked eye and each one capable of producing disease. These discharges should be kept away from the food and drink of man and animals. From specific germs that may be carried in sewage at any time there may result typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, and other dangerous ailments, and it is probable that other maladies may be traced to human waste. From certain animal parasites or their eggs that may be carried in sewage there may result intestinal worms, of which the more common are the hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, eelworm, tapeworm, and seat worm.
Sewage, drainage, or other impure water may contain also the causative agents of numerous ailments common to live stock, such as tuberculosis, foot-and-mouth disease, hog cholera, anthrax, glanders, and stomach and intestinal worms.
Disease germs are carried by many agencies and unsuspectingly received by devious routes into the human body. Infection may come from the swirling dust of the railway roadbed, from contact with transitory or chronic carriers of disease, from green truck grown in gardens fertilized with night soil or sewage, from food prepared or touched by unclean hands or visited by flies or vermin, from milk handled by sick or careless dairymen, from milk cans and utensils washed with contaminated water, or from cisterns, wells, springs, reservoirs, irrigation ditches, brooks, or lakes receiving the surface wash or the underground drainage from sewage-polluted soil.
Many recorded examples show with certainty how typhoid fever and other diseases have been transmitted. A few indicating the responsibilities and duties of people who live in the country are cited here.
In August, 1889, a sister and two brothers aged 18, 21, and 23 years, respectively, and all apparently in robust health dwelt together in a rural village in Columbiana County, Ohio. Typhoid fever in particularly virulent form developed after use of drinking water from a badly polluted surface source. The deaths of all three occurred within a space of 10 days.
In September and October, 1899, 63 cases of typhoid fever, resulting in 5 deaths, occurred at the Northampton insane hospital. This epidemic was conclusively traced to celery, which was eaten freely in August and was grown and banked in a plot that had been fertilized in the late winter or early spring with the solid residue and scrapings from a sewage filter bed situated on the hospital grounds.
Some years ago Dr. W. W. Skinner, Bureau of Chemistry, Department of Agriculture, investigated the cause of an outbreak of typhoid fever in southwest Virginia. A small stream meandered through a narrow valley in which five 10-inch wells about 450 feet deep had been drilled in limestone formation. The wells were from 50 to 400 feet from the stream, from which, it was suspected, pollution was reaching the wells. In a pool in the stream bed approximately one-fourth mile above the wells several hundred pounds of common salt were dissolved. Four of the wells were cut off from the pump and the fifth was subjected to heavy pumping. The water discharged by the pump was examined at 15-minute intervals and its salt content determined over a considerable period of time. After the lapse of several 15-minute intervals the salt began to rise and continued to rise until the maximum was approximately seven times that at the beginning of the test, thus proving the facility with which pollution may pass a long distance underground and reach deep wells.
Probably no epidemic in American history better illustrates the dire results that may follow one thoughtless act than the outbreak of typhoid fever at Plymouth, Pa., in 1885. In January and February of that year the night discharges of one typhoid fever patient were thrown out upon the snow near his home. These, carried by spring thaws into the public water supply, caused an epidemic running from April to September. In a total population of about 8,000, 1,104 persons were attacked by the disease and 114 died.
Like plants and animals, disease germs vary in their powers of resistance. Some are hardy, others succumb easily. Outside the body most of them probably die in a few days or weeks. It is never certain when such germs may not lodge where the immediate surroundings are favorable to their life and reproduction. Milk is one of the common substances in which germs multiply rapidly. The experience at Northampton shows that typhoid-fever germs may survive several months in garden soil. Laboratory tests by the United States Public Health Service showed that typhoid-fever germs had not all succumbed after being frozen in cream 74 days. Ravenel kept the spores of anthrax immersed for 244 days in the strongest tanning fluids without perceptible change in their vitality or virulence.
Deserving of severe censure is the old custom of conveying excrements or sewage into abandoned wells or some convenient stream. Such a practice is indecent and unsafe. It is unnecessary and is contrary to the laws of most of the States.
Likewise dangerous and even more disgusting is the old custom of using human excrement or sewage for the fertilization of truck land. Under no circumstances should such wastes be used on land devoted to celery, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, tomatoes, melons, or other vegetables, berries, or low-growing fruits that are eaten raw. Disease germs or particles of soil containing such germs may adhere to the skins of vegetables or fruits and infect the eater.
Upon farms it is necessary to dispose of excretal wastes at no great distance from the dwelling. The ability and likelihood of flies carrying disease germs direct to the dinner table, kitchen, or pantry are well known. Vermin, household pets, poultry, and livates.
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