According to the French method, therefore, the cesspoolage ultimately
becomes sewage, the refuse being deposited in a cesspool for a greater
or a less space of time, and finally discharged into the sewers; so
that it is a kind of intermediate process between the cesspool system
and the sewer system of defecating a town, being, as it were, a
compound of the two.
The great advantage of the sewer system, as contradistinguished from
the cesspool system of defecation, is, that it admits of the wet
refuse being removed from the neighbourhood of the house as soon
as it is produced; while the advantage of the cesspool system, as
contradistinguished from the sewer system, is, that it prevents the
contamination of the river whence the town draws its principal supply
of water. The cesspool system of defecation remedies the main evil of
the sewer system, and the sewer system the main evil of the cesspool
system. The French mode of emptying cesspools, however, appears to
have the peculiar property of combining the ill effects of both
systems without the advantages of either. The refuse of the house not
only remains rotting and seething for months under the noses of the
household, but it is ultimately--that is, after more than a year’s
decomposition--washed into the stream from which the inhabitants are
supplied with water, and so returned to them diluted in the form of
_aqua pura_, for washing, cooking, or drinking. The sole benefit
accruing from the French mode of nightmanship is, that it performs a
noisome operation in a comparatively cleanly manner; but surely this
is a small compensation for the evils attendant upon it. The noses
of those who prefer stagnant cesspools to rapid sewers cannot be so
particularly sensitive, that for the sake of avoiding the smell of
the nightman’s cart they would rather that its contents should be
discharged into the water that they use for household purposes.
The hydraulic or pump-and-hose method of emptying the cesspools is
now practised by the Court of Sewers, who introduced the process into
London in the winter of 1847. The apparatus used in this country
consists of an hydraulic pump, which is generally placed six or eight
feet distant from, but sometimes close to, the cesspool--indeed, on
its edge. It is worked by two men, “just up and down,” as one of the
labourers described it to me, “like a fire-engine.” A suction-pipe,
with an iron nozzle, is placed in the cesspool, into which is first
introduced a deodorising fluid, in the proportion, as well as can be
estimated, of a pint to a square yard of matter, and diluted with water
from the fire-plugs.
The pipes are of leather, the suction-pipes being wrapped with
spring-iron wire at the joints. India-rubber pipes were used, and
“answered very tidy,” one of the gangers told me, but they were too
expensive, the material being soon worn out: they were only tried
five or six months. The pipes now employed differ in no respect of
size or appearance from the leathern fire-engine pipes; and as the
work is always done in the daytime, and no smell arises from it, the
neighbourhood is often alarmed, and people begin to ask where the
fire is. One outsideman said, “Why, that’s always asked. I’ve been
asked--ay, I dare say a hundred times in a day--‘Where’s the fire?
where’s the fire?’” A cesspool, by this process, has been emptied into
a sewer at 300 yards distant. The pipe is placed within the nearest
gullyhole, down which the matter is washed into the sewer. When the
cesspool is emptied, it is well sluiced with water; the water is pumped
into the sewer, and then the work is complete.
The pumping is occasionally very hard work, making the shoulders and
back ache grievously; indeed, some cesspools have been found so long
neglected, and so choked with rags and rubbish, that manual labour had
to be resorted to, and the matter dug and tubbed out, after the old
mode of the nightmen. A square yard of cesspoolage is cleared out,
under ordinary circumstances, in an hour; while an average duration of
time for the cleansing of a regularly-sized cesspool is from three to
four hours.
A pneumatic pump, with an iron cart, drawn by two horses (similar to
the French invention), was tried as an experiment, but discontinued in
a fortnight.
For the hydraulic method of emptying cesspools, a gang of four men,
under the direction of a ganger, who makes a fifth, is required.