It was Jorge Agustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana, or George Santayana, the famed Spanish intellectual giant of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who first pointed out that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A recent letter to the editor bemoaning the state of the sewerage system in Karachi – Bath Island is ankle-deep in &*%$ and the well-to-do are beginning to lose their beauty sleep – constrains me to remind my fellow city-dwellers of a certain historical incident of striking similarity.
By the middle of the 19th century, London was on the brink of an environmental catastrophe. The city was growing rapidly in terms of population and size, and the old ways of supplying water, burying the dead and disposing of sewage were rapidly becoming inadequate.
For centuries, human waste had been removed from the cesspits of the city disguised by the euphemism 'night soil' and taken away for use as fertilizer on fields in the surrounding areas.
With the relentless growth of London during the middle of the Industrial Revolution, this was no longer feasible. The population of London doubled between 1801 and 1841, and the city was rapidly spreading outwards. Most houses used cesspits which were mainly drained by means of open sewers and the tributaries of the river Thames. They weren’t perfect and had the nasty tendency to overflow through floorboards and into people’s living rooms!!
With the situation worsening, something was finally done in 1847. The Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was formed to tackle the problem. Sadly, the Commission tried to open its innings with a boundary, so to speak, and found itself clean bowled. Its first act was the “genius” order to seal all the cesspits. Needless to say, without an overflow to control pressure, the sewerage now burst through the antiquated open sewer system and directly into the Thames.
The resulting stink wasn’t the only problem. London’s drinking water used to come from the Thames, and this brackish drinking water only added to the woes of the cholera epidemic of 1831-32, the first of many such outbreaks lasting through 1854 which resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people died (including 30,000 in London alone).
The tragedy of the cholera epidemics (they started in India and spread all the way to Europe) was that, at the time, it wasn’t common knowledge that cholera was a water-borne disease. The “experts” in London thought the disease was caused by miasma, the foul in the air from rotting matter, stagnant water and rats.
As is always the case when the poor suffer due to the indifference of the rich, the problem was not properly addressed until the Victorian gentry found their lovely morning and afternoon routines made unbearable by the fumes of the refuse flowing through the entire length of the city. The summer’s heat exacerbated the smells caused by the rotting sewage and soon passage to and from even Parliament became almost unbearable. The smell inside the un-ventilated building could not have been better. For some years, legislators attempted to keep the choking smells at bay by having their curtains soaked in perfume and chemicals. It was “The Great Stinks” of 1855 and 1858 that finally resulted in the government opening its coffers for the purposes of constructing the first modern sewerage system.
Although still advancing under the mistaken belief that a sewerage system would eliminate the miasma from the air and end the epidemics, the Great Stinks resulted in the passage of the Metropolitan Management Act, 1855 which in turn saw the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW). It was the MBW that was tasked by Parliament to revolutionize the sewage system, and it fell upon a single individual, the Chief Engineer of the MBW, to forge the way. That man was Joseph William Bazalgette.
Bazalgette began his career as assistant surveyor to the ill-fated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 1849 and eventually rose to become Engineer in 1852 when his superior died suddenly, under the strain of the “harassing fatigues and anxieties” which cursed that office (a similar curse, I should point out, to the one which hangs over the post of MD of the Water and Sanitation Agency, Lahore). When the MBW was established – and I can’t think of it being an easy job to do – the only man who had the qualifications to do the job was Bazalgette.
Bazalgette’s solution was to construct 83 miles of underground brick sewers and intercept sewage outflows, and 1100 miles of street sewers, to prevent raw sewage flowing through London's streets and into the river. The whole scheme took seven years to complete and was opened in 1865. Bazalgette's achievement is amazing even by modern standards and today, almost a century and a half later, London still relies on Bazalgette's sewers to keep it looking clean and beautiful.
Bazalgette was knighted in 1875, and elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1888. There is a blue plaque in his honor outside his former home in St. John’s Wood, north London. Sadly, Bazalgette’s fame is not renowned. Perhaps there is justice in the fact that this should be the fate of any good plumber (a Chief Engineer is, in a way, a glorified saantry walla): If they’ve done their job right, you never need to remember their name or call them again.
However, there was no justice when, despite of the significance of Bazalgette’s achievement, the mistaken belief that cholera was spread by miasma and that it was not a water-borne disease resulted in many more deaths due to cholera.
Just as the well-heeled of Karachi’s Bath Island now have trouble getting from their front door to their cars, the well-to-do of Lahore’s Gulberg are now beginning to see the effects of an infrastructure straining to cope with fast paced commercialization. For example, the predecessor of the Lahore Development Authority, the Lahore Improvement Trust, could not have foreseen what has become of the Main Boulevard and M.M. Alam, Gurumangat and even Hali roads. That’s why it’s frightening to think that the commercialization of M.M. Alam road is resting on a infrastructure and a 9” sewer pipe laid nearly a half-century ago.
Just as in London over a century ago, the upper classes are beginning to get wind (pun intended) of the problem only now whereas the poor in our cities have been suffering this stink for years.
The directions issued by the Punjab Environmental Tribunal about a year ago in relation to the sewerage in Lahore’s canal has yet to be fully implemented. The Tribunal had identified over 40 different points where sewerage was pumped into the Canal, including industrial and chemical waste. The Canal is over 20 miles long and, like the Thames, flows through the length of the city.
Both Karachi and Lahore share environmental challenges stemming from waste management and an overburdened sewerage system. It would be a crime if, for example, the nightmare scenario of contamination were to strike the many thousands who swim in blissful ignorance through the filth of the Lahore Canal on any summer’s day. It would be a crime for which our indifference would indict us.
I cannot speak for Karachi and the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, but Lahore does not have a Joseph Bazalgette (it has had its Sir Ganga Ram and Bhai Ram Singhs). I pray that we can learn from the examples of mistakes made through history and take the bold decisions to improve the environment today. If not, then, like Santayana predicted, we will all be condemned to repeat the horrors of the past.
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