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Bragg & Guests discuss the Great Stink - In Our Time.
Thanks to our current Tory Government we are now currently experiencing great stink all around our coasts due to the sewage that the Tories voted to permit without treatment. This makes me very angry and generally known as a bad move. I'm really looking forward to the General Election soon and make my views known at the ballot box.
A contemporary issue in the US was the anaerobic lagoon in Washington DC which almost certainly led to the death of one President, William Henry Harrison, and likely two (the other being Zachary Taylor).
On Harrison's death: <https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/59/7/990/2895539>
Well, that's reassuring to hear about the Taylor theory. I grew up with the belief that eating too much cherry ice cream could kill you.
It can, obesity increases mortality.
Also, eating 8ish red cherry pits (chewed/crushed, not just swallowed) leads to cyanide toxicity in an average weight human adult.
Or just 4 if they happen to be Morello cherries.
Kagi search results say it might have even been three:
https://rickdunhamblog.com/2014/04/02/toxic-white-house-wate...
> "The Thames, used for centuries as a convenient dumping ground for sewage..."
Still continues to this day.
> "Thames Water has pumped at least 72bn litres of sewage into the River Thames since 2020..."
> "In most areas there are not volume measuring devices, but Thames Water use sewage monitors to measure volume in some locations. The water company used them while making the Thames Tideway, and they are the only known monitors of the kind fitted in the country. Because they do not cover the entire network, it is likely far more sewage was released than that measured."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/10/thames-w...
Wow, I always assumed it was pumped far out to sea. Is it treated first?
Not currently; if the system is overwhelmed and the treatment plants start backing up then untreated water will be released in an emergency to prevent sewer from flooding up into the streets.
They are currently spending 4.3B pounds to fix it with basically a giant holding tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel
Unfortunately, Thames Water infrastructure, once state-of-the-art, is really old and it shows. It needs some serious investment to bring it to modern standards.
In Oxford, I have noticed raw sewage floating in the river several times. Things were pretty bad and authorities have sometimes issued a warning to potential swimmers.
In the market town Thame, next to the eponymous river Thames, there were frequent leaks to the main street pavement. Really disgusting and sad as it is otherwise a very cool area.
Is this not normal state-of-affairs on most countries where rivers are part of the storm water system?
In New Zealand where I am, rivers are frequently closed for swimming after very heavy rain. We have separated sewage and storm water but in heavy rain, storm water ends up getting into the sewage system which can overflow. Short of making a sewage system capable of handling the maximum flow (very expensive and not possible for an established city), or preventing any water getting into sewage (tricky to do this in a foolproof manner, as sewage needs to be vented otherwise gases build up and needs to be accessible) not much can be done about it beyond ensuring the sewage system is not overflowing for other reasons such as blockages.
EU mandates storm retention tanks, i.e. a buffer, to minimize this problem.
For instance, Madrid has built a massive 400,000 m3 tank and the problem is now solved. Lots of other main cities are doing / have done the same.
Without those, in the event of heavy rain, there is not only raw sewage but also lots of contaminants from e.g. traffic that leak into rivers and kill everything there periodically.
Wow, I looked it up. I guesstimated it would have a cylinder diameter of 160m and depth of 20m and I was pretty close at ~22m x ~190m given (its an irregular polyhedron). Its an underground lake.
I guess its a question of scale, I was referring to small rivers that meander through city suburbs and are part of the stormwater network and may have a few overflows on occasion, rather than a city of Madrid which has a population about 60% of my entire country.
In New Zealand stormwater to my knowledge is not treated.
If anyone else is interested: https://www.canaldeisabelsegunda.es/en/-/tanques-de-tormenta...
Tokyo's G-CANS, whose main tank is 25x177x78m, also shows up on HN regularly.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/g-cans-tokyos-massive-...
Could you say more about "preventing any water getting into sewage"?
I think sewage is already pretty insulated to not contaminate groundwater, is it not?
Not really, storm water can enter through drain-waste-vents, gully traps and manhole covers. It can also enter when stormwater is accidentally connected to sewage (it happens). You can seal off parts of a sewage system (eg. vacuum sewage between closed valves), but not all of it for practical and safety reasons.
But enough about Sam Smith
> Consultant engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who was already working as a surveyor for the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, was employed to mastermind a plan for sewers, pumping stations and the redevelopment of the embankments of London. The results of his remarkable efforts are still maintaining London’s health today. The Great Stink may not have the historic cachet of the Great Fire or the Plague of London, but its influence was ultimately to the good of the city.
Now the UK still has to deal with smog. Cars might be all electric in my lifetime, but smog is still a persistent problem and causes respiratory problems.
a descendent of Bazalgette invented the Big Brother reality TV show. I always think they reversed the process established by their ancestor and started pumping shit back into our homes.
The laws of the conservation of shit are immutable and inescapable. You can displace shit in spacetime but eventually it comes back.
How would the cars (And heavy duty vehicles) being all electric/hydrogen not solve the smog problem?
Electric cars only get rid of tailpipe emissions. Cars still leave other contaminants via their tyres, for instance
At least one book I have read about the rise of plastics said that during the worst years of rubber shortages in WW2 there were serious proposals to scrape roads and recover tire materials in the USA. I believe the discovery of stable artificial rubber materials, capable of being produced in volume in time for the D Day landings helped with the supply chain crisis as the armed forces moved forward (the rate of supply became a major issue and logistics demands were high)
While that is true it that has little to do with smog. Smog is air contaminants.
What do those “other contaminants” that aren’t tailpipe emissions have to do with smog?
They contribute to the smog
Most of them don't - they are heavy particulates that fall to the ground.
I've heard that break dust is also really carcinogenic.
Brake pads used to be made of asbestos, but that’s been phasing out since the 1990s. Now it’s pretty rare.
Gotcha, so the newer materials are not as bad then, I am guessing?
We very consistently repeat this.
Plastics, PFAS. Carbon ...
Until it's staring us right in the face, we just keep piling on. Our new problems aren't so easily remedied.
Thing is, there are also other things that initially look bad (eg. "vaccines linked to autism"), but then turn out to not be bad at all. Or things that are understood to be bad, but people choose to take the risk (Smoking). Or things that are known to be bad, but the benefits appear to outweigh the costs (eating meat).
It's hard to draw the line on exactly how much evidence is needed before governments should outlaw something...
Nothing about "vaccines linked to autism" ever looked bad. It was one study with sample size n=12, widely and firmly discredited, then used as the basis for a huge epidemic of motivated anti-intellectualism.
Whatever the amount of evidence is that is appropriate to build regulations on, it's certainly far, far above that.
I'm always fascinated by moments in history this, since it feels so hard to believe it happened in the first place. Even though this was happening before germ theory, it makes intuitive sense to not crap into the same water supply that gets consumed?
Anyway, the kicker is that we're doing something similar today! Climate change aside, we spew tons of noxious gasses and particulate from diesel/gas/ships right into the air we breathe in.
I agree that it makes intuitive sense (albeit from a 2024 perspective obviously, hard to tell from theirs)
But when I learned about it, I believe part of the issue was that the speed at which industrialization happened overshot the ability of the infrastructure to keep up, also the increase in population, decrease in living conditions in london, made those kind of concerns secondary to things like food