The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's HandbookBoulnois, H. Percy (Henry Percy)
Science
The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook
Boulnois, H. Percy (Henry Percy)
Municipal engineering; Sanitary engineering
The great difficulty attached to this duty arises from the fact that
these private courts and alleys are generally very badly paved, if paved
at all, full of pits, where pools of stagnant mud and water collect, and
even in the best cases, the interstices between the pebbles, or other
paving, are filled with filth arising in great measure from the dirty
habits of the people, and this filth it is found exceedingly difficult
to dislodge. The remedy for this is to compel the owners of the abutting
properties to have the courts and alleys properly paved with asphalte,
or other equally impervious material, after which it would be easy for
the urban authority to cause them to be swept at least once a day, and
flushed with water in the hot weather once a week, but in order to
compel the owners to execute this very desirable work it would be
necessary to put the complicated machinery of section 150 of the Public
Health Act 1875 in force, and the expense to the landlords would be in
many cases very disproportionate to the value of their property.
Out of the ninety towns to which reference has before been made, the
authorities of only nineteen of them cleanse the private courts and
alleys in their jurisdiction, although for the sake of sanitation it is
very desirable that such work should be so undertaken by them.
In most towns it is necessary to cleanse its principal streets at least
once a day, and this appears to be the practice of nearly all the ninety
towns I have referred to; only seven of them, however, appear to have
this operation repeated more frequently; in several towns, the horse
droppings, &c., are removed at once, under what is called the “orderly”
system, and this is especially necessary in streets that are paved with
such materials as wood paving, asphalte, or granite setts. The suburban
streets of a town need only be cleansed once or twice a week, except in
special cases of extremes of mud or snow, and I will now proceed to
discuss the questions involved by a heavy fall of the latter.
Experiments have shown that a cubic yard of fresh fallen snow may weigh
as much as 814 pounds or as little as 71 pounds. Assuming that a cubic
foot will weigh 16·38 pounds, I estimate that for a fall of 3 inches of
snow upon a street 36 feet in width, 20 tons, representing a bulk of
about 100 cubic yards, would have to be removed for every 100 yards of
length of street if it was thought necessary to clear it away.
Assuming that there are 30 miles of street in a town from which the snow
must be removed; 21,144 loads must be carted somewhere, at a cost of at
least 1,500_l._, assuming that each cart could make ten trips a day, and
even then it would take 352 carts a whole week to effect it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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