The Big Necessity by Rose George Read Free Book Online

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 meon 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 gota 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.
    This isn’t the only pressing problem. Greeley’s life is more difficult because when the nineteenth-century sewerage commission came back from Europe and made its decision, it was the wrong one. At the time, there were two major design choices for sewer systems. The first separates sewage from storm water and is called a