Report of the County Medical Officer of Health delegated by the County Council to attend the meetings of the Sanitary Congress held in Leeds, September, 1897 : submitted to the Sanitary Committee, November 4th, 1897.

  • Essex (England). County Council
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the County Medical Officer of Health delegated by the County Council to attend the meetings of the Sanitary Congress held in Leeds, September, 1897 : submitted to the Sanitary Committee, November 4th, 1897. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/12 (page 5)
    through suitable land. The problem, therefore, is—can artificial means be devised whereby this change can be brought about with sufficient rapidity and with sufficient economy as to render irrigation unnecessary, and at the same time can the insoluble as well as the soluble organic matter be acted upon, or will it still be necessary to separate the former and have the trouble and expense of dealing with the sludge ? Mr. Donald Cameron, the City Surveyor of Exeter,, claims that he has devised a process which prevents the formation of sludge, and so efficiently purifies sewage that land irrigation is unnecessary. There are two stages in this process. In the first the raw sewage flows through a dark underground tank cut off from access of air and it occupies about 24 hours in traversing this tank. Here it is stated that those organisms which flourish best in the absence of air and light so act upon the insoluble organic matters as to render them soluble, and so affect the organic matter generally as to render it more easily oxidizable in the next stage of the process. This consists in aerating the tank effluent and passing it through beds of coke breeze. The breeze holds large quantities of air (and therefore of oxygen) in its pores, and the organisms which effect the oxidizing process here flourish and the organic matter is rapidly converted into innocuous inorganic compounds of nitrogen and carbon. This “ septic tank system” can only be regarded as still on trial. Many have faith in it merely because they have had occasion to observe that sometimes when a cesspool has been opened with the expectation of finding it full of solid matter, it has been found to contain practically none. I have noticed something of this kind, but the most rapid change of insoluble foecal matter into the liquid form which I have observed took place in a large tank which was open both to light and air. This tank received all the sewage from a small town and collected the solids. One summer, when the receptacle was nearly full of solids, a kind of rapid fermentation set in, the effluent from it became of a reddish yellow colour, and contained an enormous amount of organic matter in solution, and practically the whole of the solid