The Big Necessity (37 page)

To understand what this has to do with modern plumbing, go to Amoy Gardens, a large apartment block in Hong Kong. In 2003, a seventh-floor bathroom in Amoy Gardens became an epicenter of an
outbreak of SARS, when a man who had caught the infection in hospital came to stay with his brother. He had diarrhea, and because his brother's bathroom wasn't working properly—the air vent was sucking out sewage droplets trapped in faulty U-bends—his infectious diarrheal droplets were spread up and down the floors. Because SARS spread from person to person, required no vector, and incubated unnoticed for a week, it spread on several international flights between mainland China, Singapore, and Canada. By the end of the four-month outbreak, 8,422 cases had been reported and 11 percent of those people died. And some of it happened because of faulty sanitation in the developed, sophisticated environs of Hong Kong. No country is protected, the WHO report stated bluntly, “by virtue of its wealth or its high levels of education, standards of living and health care or equipment and personnel at border crossings.” In fact, SARS was “a disease of prosperous urban centers.” And of those centers' apparently sophisticated but actually flawed and disregarded sanitation infrastructure. The slums of Mumbai and Lagos may seem far removed from modern cities built on sturdy sewers and sanitary confidence. They look like a seething, desperate Dickensian past. But what if they're the future?

 

The economist William Easterly, in
White Man's Burden
, recently divided the aid world into Planners and Searchers. Planners are the top-down bureaucrats; they are the ones who put toilets on people's heads while not thinking of making the nearby bush seem an unattractive option instead. They are the engineers and wastewater managers, the workshop attendees and the gray suits who don't want to do it differently. They are the stagnant status quo of sanitation. This book has been about Searchers. Joe Madiath, Kamal Kar, Wang Ming Ying. Jessie, the Plan volunteer in Gan Quan Fang, who took her leave by saying, “I just want to change my surroundings. I know I am only small energy. But I want to try my best.”

What is the best? Someone once asked me for a systems theory about sanitation. He wanted something that could solve everything. I had to disappoint him. But I think the first step is an easy one. In 1940, Harold Farnsworth Gray concluded that “urban man today still
unnecessarily pollutes streams, bathing beaches, bays and estuaries, without benefit of the excuse of ignorance which was available to his ancestors.” We have less ignorance and less excuse. The first thing sanitation needs is a spotlight shining on it. It needs to be unshackled from shame. It needs some scrutiny.

We can do better, I'm certain, than the young man in London, who came around the hours of midnight to where I was standing with the flushers around an open manhole. The pubs had just closed, but he was the only person among several passing crowds to amble over to what I thought was an arresting scene of several burly men and one woman, in crotch-harnesses, paper overalls, and thigh-high waders, standing around a black hole in the street. The young man asked what we were doing. It was a good start. I waited for him to ask more, such as where the sewers went and what happened when they got there. Or why we refuse to notice that we still don't know how to properly deal with something that we all produce, up to several times a day, many million years after we first started producing it.

But a flusher answered his only question, quick as a rat, with, “We're opening a nightclub, mate.” And the young man nodded and moved away, with no further questions.

 

 

__________

__________

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION: EXAMINING THE UNMENTIONABLES

2.6 billion don't have sanitation
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2006, “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. v.

10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria
Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), “A Guide to Investigating One of the Biggest Scandals of the Last 50 Years” (Geneva: WSSCC, n.d.), p. 3.

One in ten illnesses
Bad sanitation is linked to, for example, respiratory infections (which can be spread by unwashed hands); malnutrition; malaria; and worm infections. A. Prüss-Üstün et al.,
Safer Water, Better Health: Costs, Benefits and Sustainability of Interventions to Protect and Promote Health
(Geneva: WHO Press, 2008), p. 8.

Nearly 90 percent
World Health Organization, “Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Links to Health, Facts and Figures, updated November 2004,” available from
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/facts2004/en/
.

Ten percent of cells are human
Gary Hamilton, “Insider Trading,”
New Scientist
, June 26, 1999.

Since the Second World War
“Responding to the Sanitation Scandal: WSSCC Launches the Global Sanitation Fund,” WSSCC news release, March 7, 2008.

The biggest medical milestone
“Medical Milestones,”
British Medical Journal
,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/suppl_1/DC3
.

One child out of two
Stephen Halliday,
The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital
(Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1999, repr. 2007), p. vii.

Mortality dropped by a fifth
Johan Mackenbach, “Sanitation: Pragmatism Works,”
British Medical Journal
334 (January 6, 2007): s17, supp. 2.

Reduce diarrhea by nearly 40 percent
Val Curtis and Sandy Cairncross, “Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at Kyoto,”
British Medical Journal
327 (July 5, 2003): 3–4.

Modern sanitation has added twenty years
Personal communication with Gary Ruvkun, March 2003.

50,000 people nationwide
Steven Johnson,
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London
(London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 70.

Forced to issue boil-water notices
“We'll be boiling water until the summer—HSE,”
Galway Advertiser
, March 29, 2007.

600 times levels permitted
RTE, “Dirty Water: Galway,” May 24, 2007,
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/investigate/1134569.html
.

We haven't had any for two years
Clare County Council, Ennis Public Water Supply Reminder, December 14, 2007,
http://www.clarecoco.ie/news/news.html
.

Nearly half the country
Working data table provided by Peter Kristensen, European Environment Agency, based on data from Eurostat and national sources.

Fined $15 million a day
Personal communication with European Commission press office, February 2008.

1.7 million
“The U.S. 2000 Census reveals that more than 1.7 million people in the United States, 670,986 households, still lack the basic plumbing facilities that most of us have come to take for granted.” Rural Community Assistance Partnership, “Still Living Without the Basics in the 21st Century: Analyzing the Availability of Water and Sanitation Services in the United States,” 2004, p. 3.

Milwaukee's drinking water
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “Swimming in Sewage” (Washington, D.C.: NRDC, February 2004), p. 50; see also Robert D. Morris,
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

Full-strength, untreated sewage
NRDC, “Swimming in Sewage,” p. 51.

Ninety percent of the world's sewage
Reuters, “World Sanitation Goals Slip, Nature Can Help,” March 16, 2008.

Defecation is very lowly
Bindeshwar Pathak, “History of Toilets,” paper presented at International Symposium on Public Toilets, Hong Kong, May 25–27, 1995.

The lonely bewilderment of bodily functions
William Cummings, “Squat Toilets and Cultural Commensurability,”
Journal of Mundane Behavior
1/3 (October 2000): 268.

Drains are a great and glorious thing
Rudyard Kipling,
Letters of Rudyard Kipling
, ed. Thomas Pinney (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1990–2004), 1: 121.

A meritorious undertaking
Sigmund Freud, “Preface to Bourke's
Scatologic Rites of All Nations
,” in
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, trans. from the German by James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1995), p. 337.

Slowly through a pond filled with reeds
http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/personalprofiles/residences/highgrove/
.

The only patent-holding monarch in the world
The patent for the Chaipattana Aerator was granted to King Bhumibol on February 2, 1993. The Chaipattana Foundation,
http://www.chaipat.or.th/chaipat_old/journal/aug03/aerator_e.html
.

My baby doesn't smell
Trevor I. Case, Betty M. Repacholi, and Richard J. Stevenson, “My Baby Doesn't Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
27 (2006): 357–65.

Scatological burglars
Albert B. Friedman, “The Scatological Rites of Burglars,”
Western Folklore
27 (1968): 171–79.

Sniffed like snuff
Martin Monestier,
Histoire et Bizarreries Sociales des Excréments: Des Origines à Nos Jours
(Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 1997), p. 93.

Ninety percent of patients recover
Thomas Borody, a pioneer of the technique, has written that “there are few medical therapies that reduce illness so dramatically.” Thomas J. Borody, “Flora Power: Fecal Bacteria Cure Chronic
C. difficile
Diarrhea,”
American Journal of Gastroenterology
11 (August 1995): 3028–29.

You don't ever see or smell a thing
Megan Levy, “Grandma Saved by Daughter's Poo,”
Daily Telegraph
, November 29, 2007.

Once people got talking about bathrooms
“Examining the Unmentionables,”
Time
, May 20, 1966.

A dozen categories of euphemism
Steven Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
(London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 351.

Without talking frankly about shit
WSSCC,
Listening
(Geneva: WSSCC, 2004), p. 44.

[Humanity's] wiser course
Freud quotes from the last scene of
Faust
, where the “more perfected angels” lament
“Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest/zu tragen peinlich/und wär' er von Asbest/er ist nicht reinlich”
(We still have a trace of the Earth, which is distressing to bear; and though it were of asbestos, it is not cleanly). Men, Freud writes, “have chosen to evade the predicament by so far as possible denying the very existence of this inconvenient ‘trace of the Earth,' by concealing it from one another, and by withholding from it the attention and care which it might claim as an integrating component of their essential being.” Freud, “Preface,” pp. 335–36.

1. IN THE SEWERS

Sewer workers Joe Harlow and Dave Yasis
Associated Press, “Body of Missing Minnesota Sewer Worker Found,” July 28, 2007.

Stalwart good-looking specimens
Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851; London: Cass, 1861–1862) 2: 428.

300 flushers
Personal communication with Douglas Greeley, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, September 2007.

284 égoutiers
Section de l'Assainissement de Paris,
http://www.paris.fr
.

At the time of my visit, it was 39
Thames Water press office says there are now 49 full-time sewer inspectors, of whom 43 are flushers.

Its third owner in nineteen years
“RWE Sells Thames Water Holdings PLC to Kemble Water Limited for GBP 4.8 Billion (€7.2 billion),” Thames Water news release, October 17, 2006.

915 million liters of clean water
“Mayor Sets Out Case Against a Desalination Plant for London,” Greater London Authority news release, July 26, 2006.

850,000 handsets inadvertently flushed
“Brits Flush Away Mobiles Worth £342 Million,” Simplyswitch news release, June 4, 2007.

A lingerie set
BBC News, “Flushed Bra Causes Sewer Collapse,” June 19, 2007.

That's Canal No. 5, that is
Sukhdev Sandhu,
Night Haunts
(London: Verso, 2007), p. 65.

The contents of his neighbor's privy
“Going down to my cellar . . . I put my feet into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr. Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me; but I will have it helped.”
Diary of Samuel Pepys
, 20 October 1660, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1970), p. 269.

The most unfashionable muck
The enterprising sewer workers of Paris also skimmed corks from the flow and sold them to perfume makers to use as
stoppers. Donald Reid,
Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 53.

Courtyards filled with fecal matter
(
“Le réceptacle de toutes les horreurs de l'humanité . . . les passages de communication, les cours, les corridors sont remplis d'urine et de matières fécales.”
) Turneau de la Morandière, quoted in Martin Monestier,
Histoire et Bizarreries Sociales des Excréments
(Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 1997), p. 98 (my translation).

Excreta would corrode the gold
Aleksandr Lipkov, lecture at the World Toilet Summit, Moscow, September 2006.

London grew
Stephen Halliday,
The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital
(Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1999, 2007), p. 45.