Wastewater
As we've discussed, coastal policy seeks to resolve conflicts among the various ways we use the land and water along our shores. Intuitively, one of the most striking conflicts is between relying on coastal waters as a source of food and a dumping ground
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Wastewater
As we’ve discussed, coastal policy seeks to resolve conflicts among the various ways we use the land and water along our shores. Intuitively, one of the most striking conflicts is between relying on coastal waters as a source of food and a dumping ground for human waste.Yet humanity has been doing both since its earliest gatherings. As cities developed, dispos ing of waste in coastal waters became common, eventually contaminat ing seafood and causing severe illness.The following pages focus on this fundamental conflict, and the science, technology, and law to resolve it. In this chapter, we examine how the policy process, through sector-based management, has been used to address the problem.
Sewage and disease: A problem Human health drives public policy. The installation of sewers and ulti mately the development of sewage treatment in New York City illustrate this phenomenon. By 1664, the one thousand settlers of what was to be come New York had established a practice of dumping chamber pots in open drainage ditches in the streets, which flowed to the rivers on either side of the island of Manhattan (Goldman, 1997; Kurlansky, 2006). By the 1830s open sewers had given way to closed systems beneath the streets, but the effect remained the same: untreated human waste was discharged to marine waters. At the time, flowing waters were presumed to purify wastes, an assumption we now know to be false.
R. Burroughs, Coastal Governance, Foundations of Contemporary Environmental Studies, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-016-3_3, © Richard Burroughs 2011
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Waste was often discharged near oyster grounds, and with many New Yorkers consuming oysters in great quantities, the contamination led to hundreds of deaths from cholera in 1832 (Kurlansky, 2006). Although this was not fully understood at the time, cholera is an infectious gastro intestinal disease caused by bacteria. Plentiful supplies of safe drinking water, had they been available, could have averted some of the deaths. But heavy reliance on wells for drinking water limited the ability to provide uniformly safe supplies. In essence, the system to move human and ani mal waste off the island or treat it was not effective enough to protect groundwater. One solution was to import water. In 1842 the Croton Aqueduct began flowing from a rural area north of the city, and in a few years nearly two hundred miles of water pipes were in operation (Goldman, 1997). Clean drinking water became avail able to large parts of the city.With clean water from a secure source, an important impediment to city growth had been eliminated. However, there were consequences. Although imported water helped alleviate one aspect of the health problem, the resulting growth com plicated it. More than one hundred miles of sewers collected wastewa ter and discharged human, animal, and other wastes without treatment. Oysters continued to be contaminated. In 1854 the death of prominent New Yorkers from cholera made people suspect that the disease might be triggered by oyste
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