Well, it’s been a little slow around here lately, so it’s time to get your minds back into the sewers :-)
Actually, some of this stuff is interesting from a historical perspective.
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Manila Times
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Night soil and other ‘unmentionables’
By Augusto V. de Viana
A topic that many people refuse to talk about is public sanitation. Why so? Because for one, there are not enough facilities in the streets to this day like public toilets. There is also a long-standing problem on where to dispose the metro’s garbage as existing dumpsites are already overfilled, so the trash is strewn everywhere. Vacant lots, street corners, rivers and esteros are therefore clogged with refuse, causing floods during the rainy season. Aggravating these problems are the disgusting habits of many people who relieve themselves in public, such as jeepney drivers who urinate on the wheels of their vehicles or the nearest wall or post, as well as Filipinos who have the habit of spitting on the streets.
Public sanitation is obviously taken for granted in this country when it should be taken seriously. This is what prevents the spread of highly communicable diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, measles and influenza.
Teaching people to develop the responsibility in keeping their surroundings clean is useless, unless it goes hand in hand with adequate sanitary services.
In the early 20th century, authorities in Manila began a campaign to clean up the city’s surroundings. There was the constant threat of diseases like cholera and the bubonic plague in many parts of Manila, which were conducive to germs. These conditions are recorded in government documents, such as the Report of the Philippine Commission, published in 1903. It contains details including the disposal of “night soil,” the state of the city’s sewers, drains and gutters, garbage disposal, cemeteries and water supply.
The toilets of Manila
“Night soil” is another name for human fecal matter. Throughout history, there have been several methods or systems in the Philippines concerning night soil disposal. These were made through various methods, one of which was the use of traps connected to private sewers, emptying to rivers, esteros and the Manila Bay. There were also traps connected with cesspools or pozo negros. These traps were eventually considered obsolete and unsanitary.
Another system of disposing night soil was through open vaults built of solid masonry called depositos, which are emptied from time to time. When the masonry was not used, vaults were just dug in the ground. Some of the early toilets were superstructures or the familiar casitas built over earth pits.
The most primitive ways of night soil disposal were extremely unsanitary. These were the barrel and bucket system in which the wastes fall into barrels and collected by buckets. There were also casitas without pits so that wastes deposits just drop to the ground and taken cared of by hogs or desiccation. The latest method at this time was removal by means of night vessels in which the contents were simply thrown around different premises. The Board of Health of the city eventually closed down many of these toilets because they were a menace to public health.
The location of the vaults was sometimes close to wells which were sources of drinking water that allowed leaches to contaminate them causing water-borne diseases like cholera. The health board prohibited the most unsanitary methods of disposing night soil because these allowed the propagation of flies. Hogs were also prohibited from moving around so that they will not eat wastes, which were the causes of the spread of trichinosis.
Until the early 20th century, some of the best houses in Manila were provided a toilet seat in the second storey or outside the house, and the deposit was allowed to drop in the yard below where it is finally scrapped and carried away. The contents of the pozo negros are then emptied by excavators and their contents dumped into the sea. The depositos were commonly found in Manila and some cities around the country. The stone walls of these vaults were permeated with fecal matter so that a permanent odor of night soil could be detected even in the finest residences of the city. The Board of Health sought to close down all these depositos until an effective sewer system was installed.
Sewers
Manila’s early sewers were designed to make use of the tides in flushing out and carrying away sewage. These were sewers constructed in the districts of Intramuros, Binondo, San Nicolas and Santa Cruz. The main sewers were built of stone masonry with flat bottoms, vertical sides and arched tops. They are intended to run clean at low tide. Since the sewers had flat bottoms, the area where sewerage spreads reduces the velocity of flow to the sea. It was believed the larger the sewer, the better. On the contrary smaller sewers with rounded bottoms were better. It led to the invention of the egg-shaped sewer, which was adopted by the sanitary engineers.
Subsurface drains consisted of narrow stone gutters built at the edge of the pavement with a covering of ordinary stone put together. In many sections, surface water accumulated especially during the rainy season. As a result the sides of the streets, and eventually the street itself, became a pool of stagnant water. It was envisioned that pumping stations would have to be provided for adequate drainage.
Garbage disposal
With regard to garbage disposal, the city’s refuse was collected in garbage cans, placed in front of each house with its contents removed by carts. The garbage was then loaded on a barge and taken out to sea and dumped. This method, which is environmentally destructive, was not strictly carried out, especially in the districts where nipa houses abounded. In these areas where houses were crowded together, there were no cemented streets, and garbage was just strewn about. These places, therefore, were ideal breeding places for rats, flies and the germs that they carry. It was necessary to burn down the entire colony at Manila’s Parola to prevent the spread of disease, especially during the cholera epidemic of 1903 which killed many people, among them Apolinario Mabini. The inhabitants were relocated to San Nicolas.
Esteros
Manila’s esteros as well as their branches, much like today, were dirty and smelly. They served as waterways, sewers, open drains and irrigation ditches. Very few of them were properly dredged. The sewers of private houses emptied into the esteros bringing to them night soil from nearby nipa houses. The authorities planned to dredge the esteros so low tide would flush out all the wastes out to sea.
Cemeteries
Manila used to have 13 cemeteries, which were La Loma, Paco, Santa Cruz, Balic Balic, Binondo, Tondo, Maytubig, Malate, Pandacan, Santa Ana, San Pedro Macati, and the American National and Chinese cemeteries. The dead were interned in niches or graves.
Graves were usually seven feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide and five feet deep for adults, with smaller proportion for children. The distance between each grave was one meter. Those who die of infectious diseases, if they were not cremated, were buried covered with quicklime and buried seven feet deep. Ordinary graves were filled with earth and left with a mound of about a foot and a half high. Sometimes they were covered with a kind of mortar made of lime and sand.
Before the arrival of the Americans and some months after their occupation of the city of Manila, burials without coffins were permitted. But, with the organization of the Board of Health for the Philippines, such a practice was forbidden. Niches were sometimes used but were costly, and affordable only to the wealthy. Formerly, bodies interred in the ground or in niches were undisturbed for five years. The government charges 34.65 Mexican pesos for a niche for an adult and P16.80 for a child. The fee is good for five years rent. If the members of the family did not rerent these, the bones of the departed were collected and buried in a common pit or placed in a small walled enclosure for their reception.
Water Supply
When the Americans began their occupation of Manila, the residents got their water from four sources: the Marikina River, wells, cisterns and the Pasig River. The main supply of the city came from the Marikina River. This system, which was built during the 19th century, had a daily capacity of 10,000,000 gallons a day. Water was pumped from the river to the pumping station in Santolan to two subterranean reservoirs or depositos in San Juan. One of these depositos had a capacity of 6,300,000 gallons while the other had 8,200,000, which translates to two days’ supply for Manila. From San Juan, the water was allowed to flow by gravity to Sampaloc where the water branches out to other districts of the city. To keep constant water pressure, these reservoirs were always kept full even during the dry season. The maximum pressure of the water was only 40 pounds per square inch. By the time it reached the distant sections of Manila the pressure was almost negligible.
The water from the waterworks system was also unsafe. The Marikina River where the water was obtained passed through heavily populated areas like Montalban, San Mateo and Marikina. People living along the river used the water not only for themselves but also for bathing their domestic animals. During the rainy season the filth from the Marikina Valley was washed into the river. The US Army made a bacteriological study of the water several points below and above Marikina, and found as much as 613,703 bacteria to a cubic meter. This was a striking contrast to 73 in Boston, and 50 to 75 in New York. The water was unsafe for drinking unless it was boiled or properly filtered.
There was no accurate record on the number of wells. Most of them were located in the backyards. As a rule, majority of them were dirty and the water polluted. This source of water was to be abolished as soon as possible to prevent any outbreak of disease.
Cisterns, which were better known as artesian wells on the other hand, were quite common in Intramuros and in many of the older and better houses of Manila. These are made of sheet iron and situated above the surface. Others were built in the ground and made of stone or cement.
Aside from being contaminated the water supply was insufficient. Additional pumps as well as hydrants were needed. The number of connections for public water supply was far below any American city that is the size of Manila. In 1903, there were only 1,825 private subscribers. There were plans to build good filtration beds and more pumping stations. A new water supply was under consideration including a new water source possibly far from Manila.
A catastrophe in the making
Not much has changed in public sanitation services judging from information more than a hundred years ago. Some of the said sanitary practices are still very much in use. Others were prohibited because they were a constant hazard to public health and to the environment, such as the dumping of garbage at sea. To this day, Manila’s sewage, like that of the rest of the country, is untreated. The existing dumpsites are becoming inadequate as they are filled. Even with dumpsites, not all the garbage could be accommodated, and therefore end up in rivers, esteros and vacant lots.
With the increase of population of Manila as well as the rest of the country, and the present state of the country’s health and sanitary services, the risks of a catastrophe from unsanitary habits and living conditions become more imminent. The country’s leaders as well as the general public should seriously take a look at this frequently ignored aspect of our country’s history.
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