A Handbook of Health. Woods Hutchinson
which had been obliged to give up their wells, were beginning to collect the water from these same brooks and streams in reservoirs and deliver it in pipes to all their houses, it can be easily seen that we had simply exchanged one danger for another.
The Loss of Life from Typhoid Fever. For a time, indeed, it looked as if the new danger were the greater of the two, because, when the typhoid germs were washed into a well, they poisoned or infected only one, or at most two or three, families who used the water from that well. But when they were carried into a stream which was dammed to form a reservoir to supply a town with water, then the whole population of the town might become infected. A great many epidemics of typhoid fever occurred in just this way, before people realized how great this danger was. Simply from the pouring of the wastes from one or two typhoid fever cases into the streams leading into the water reservoir used by a town, five hundred, a thousand, or even three or four thousand cases of typhoid have developed within a few weeks, with from one hundred to five hundred deaths.
TYPHOID EPIDEMIC IN THE MOHAWK-HUDSON VALLEY, 1891–92
In 1891–92 typhoid fever broke out in Schenectady on the Mohawk River. Following this, Cohoes and West Troy, which drew their water supply from the Mohawk below Schenectady, and Albany, which drew its supply from the Hudson below the mouth of the Mohawk, suffered from typhoid epidemics; while Waterford and Troy, which drew their supplies from the Hudson above the mouth of the Mohawk, and the river towns that, like Lansingburgh, drew from other sources, entirely escaped the infection.
In fact, even to-day, when these dangers are better understood, and while most of our big cities are getting fairly clear of typhoid, so ignorant and careless are the smaller towns, villages, and private houses all over the United States, that over 35,000 deaths[14] from typhoid fever occur every year in a country which prides itself upon its cleanliness and its intelligence. This means, too, that there are at least half a million people sick of the disease, and in bed or utterly prevented from working, for from five to fifteen weeks each. All of which frightful loss of human life and human labor, to say nothing of the grief, bereavement, and anxiety of the two million or more families and relatives of these typhoid victims, is due to eating dirt and drinking filth. Dirt is surely the most expensive thing there is, instead of the cheapest.
METHODS OF OBTAINING PURE WATER
Wise Planning and Spending of Money is Necessary. If our city wells are defiled by manure heaps and vault-privies, and our streams by sewage, where are we to turn for pure water? All that is required is foresight and a little intelligent planning and wise spending of money. Of course the community must take hold of the problem, through a Board of Health, or Health Officer, appointed for the purpose; and this is why questions of health are coming to play such an important part in legislation, and even in politics. No matter how fast a city is growing or how much money its inhabitants are making, if it has an impure water supply or a bad sewage system, there will be disease and death, suffering and unhappiness among its people, which no amount of money can make up for. Cleanliness is not only next to godliness, but one of the most useful forms of it; and a city can afford to spend money liberally to secure it—in fact, it is the best investment a city can make.
Artesian and Deep Wells. The earliest, and still the most eagerly sought-for, source of pure water supply is springs or deep wells, such as we have referred to. Both of these are fed by rain water which has fallen somewhere upon the surface of the earth. As the layers of earth or rock, of which the crust of the earth is made up, do not run level, or horizontal, but are tilted and tipped in all directions, this rain water soaks down until it reaches one of these sloping layers that is so hard, or tough, as to be waterproof, and then runs along over its surface in a sort of underground stream. If anywhere in the course of this stream a very deep well shaft is driven right down through the soil until it strikes the surface of this sloping layer of rock, then the water will rise in this shaft to the level of the highest point from which it is running.
The sketch shows a wide section from northern Illinois to central Wisconsin, in which the cities have rejected the water supplies afforded by the rivers, choosing instead to bore down almost to hard rock to insure the purity of the supply.
If this highest point of the waterproof layer be many miles away, up in the hills above the surface of the ground where the well is dug, then the water will rise to the surface and sometimes even spout twenty, thirty, or fifty feet above it. This forms what is known as a gushing, or artesian, well (from Artois, a province in France, in which such wells were first commonly used) and furnishes a very pure and valuable source of water supply. If it rises only twenty, thirty, or fifty feet in the well-shaft, but keeps flowing in at a sufficient rate, then we get what is known as a "living," or permanent well, and this also is a very valuable and pure source of water supply.
Springs. Springs are formed on the same plan as the deep well, but with the difference that the waterproof layer on top of which the water is running either crops out on the surface again, lower down the mountain, or folds upon itself and comes up again to the surface some distance away from the mountain chain, out on the level. This is why springs are usually found in or near mountainous or hilly regions. If the water of a spring has gone deep enough into, or far enough through, the layers of the earth, it may, like water of some of the artesian wells, contain certain salts and minerals, particularly soda, sulphur, and iron. Such springs are often highly valued as mineral water, healing springs, or baths, partly because of these salts, partly on account of their peculiar taste. Most of the virtues ascribed to mineral waters or springs are due, however, to their pure water, and its cleansing effects internally and externally when freely used.
Springs are among the most highly prized sources of water supply, because they have gone underground sufficiently deep to become well filtered and cooled to a low temperature, and usually not far enough to become too heavily loaded with salts or minerals like the waters of the deep wells. It must, however, be remembered that they also come from rain-water, and that in hilly or broken regions the source of that rain water may be the surface of the ground only a few hundred yards up the hill or mountain, and impurities there may affect it. Much of the delightful sparkle of spring water is due, as in the case of the popular soda water, to the presence of carbon dioxid, only in spring water it is produced by the decomposition of vegetable matter in it. As springs usually break out in a hollow or at the foot of a hill, unless carefully closed in they are quite liable to contamination from rain water from the surrounding surface of the ground. Where springs of a sufficient size can be reached, or a sufficiently "live" series of deep wells can be bored, these furnish a safe source of water supply for cities. But of course not more than one city in five or ten is so favored.
Mountain Reservoirs. Two other methods of securing a water supply are now generally adopted. One is to pick out some stream up in the hills or mountains, within fifteen miles or so of the city, and put in a dam, thus making a reservoir, or to enlarge some lake which already exists there. At the same time, the entire valley, or slope of the mountain, which this stream or lake drains of its surface water, is bought up by the Government, or turned into a forest reserve, so that no houses can be built or settlement of any kind permitted upon it. It can still be used for lumber supply, for pastures, and, within reasonable limits, for a great public hunting and fishing reserve and camping resort.
Almost every intelligent and farsighted town, which has not springs or deep wells, is looking toward the acquirement of some such