Dealing with Waste from London has always been troublesome. There is a perfect way, known as the Thames that snakes through the capital, which is used to get rid of it. However if this is also used for drinking water as well, you start to get issues.
The problem in London was that the removal of human waste was served by an ancient sewage system that owed more to the Roman system that had originally been put there. Successive governments had continued to disregard the issue and, with the arrival of the great Stink, things came to a head by 1858. Combined with a heatwave, the scent of the drains made the capital unbearable. It got so bad that in the Houses of Parliament, even the use of carbolic sheets could not avoid the smell. Something obviously had to be done about it but worse was to come from waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera.
There was a real concern at the time that the odour would give people illness through miasma. Cases of cholera were rising. What they did not know was that you got the illness through the water itself you could not chat anything from the smell. The smell was a warning but not the cause. A call to a Drainage Cleaning Near Me company would have helped immensely.
Fortunately, there was a response from Joseph Bazalgette. He suggested a series of embankments to direct the water’s flow eastward to the sea. The locations of pumping stations that would raise the sewage out of the pipes and into the water then away were also planned and built.
