Cameron County press. [volume] (Emporium, Cameron County, Pa.) 1866-1922, 1908-08-06

i ne Dig sewers or Paris nave gained
a worldwide notoriety; sewers in
which the criminal classes could hide
and escape detection, and big enough
to permit faIr-sized boats sailing
through them. But now one American
| city at least has, or rather has in the
course of construction, a sewer which
| far exceeds in size anything which
Paris possesses, or any other city of
the world, for that matter. 1t is big
| enough to permit a big tug to steam
| through it's bricked and cemented
walls. 1t is known as the Harlem
| Creek sewer and will be 20 feet in
diameter in it's largest section and
| from 81 feet to Is feet in the smaller
| sections, the main section and the two
branches measuring over four miles
in extent and the whole draining more
than 5000 acres of land. There are
longer sewers than this, and there are
drainage systems, not sewers, which
drain much larger tracts of land, but
there is no sewer in the world that
combines such great size with extent
of area drained, and there is no city
drainage system in the world that in
ally way compares with it.
To the average person 20-foot
sewer means nothing at all, because
| the usual man or woman knows little
about sewers; but to engineers and
contractors it means something stu
pendous in sewer construction. Six
| teen feet has heretofore been the ex-
| treme size for city sewers, and most
sewers are from 10 to II feet in
diameter, with branch lines very much
smaller, in some cases only foot or
| 18 inches in diameter. When these
| figures are considered and compared
with the dimensions of the Harlem
| Creek sewer, even the uninitiated can
not fail to see what an enormous work
the city of st. Louis has in hand in
| its new sewer. The Harlem Creek
sewer Is nearly twice as large in its
internal diameter as any other sewer
yet built. From its lowest point to
the top of the arch 1t is more than
| twice the height of a high-ceilinged
room and almost three times the
| height of the ordinary modern ceilings.
| From the surface of the water when
the sewer runs at ordinary capacity
| to the top of the arch is 10 feet 6
| inches, or half again the height of the
ordinary room. Gasoline launches
| could sail up this sewer without diff
Guilty at any stage of water, and when
the flow is low a tugboat would have
no trouble in steaming from one end
Of the large section to the other. If
| the bottom of the sewer were level, a
loaded van could drive through it and
still have room to spare at the top.
The Harlem Creek sewer was be-
gun July IS, 1906, and Sewer Commits
sioner Fardwell expects to have the
public section, or that section running
from Florissant avenue to the river,
completed within another year. The
entire system will probably not be
finished for three or four years more,
and all the connecting lines will not
be laid till the section drained be-
comes more thickly populated.
The popular idea of large sewers
has been gained from the lurid pic
lures which Victor Hugo and Eugene
Sue have drawn of the sewers of Paris,
and from what the many less illus
trious writer's have said of the sewers
Of London and other European cities.
London has the most complicated
and longest sewer system owing to its
great extent and enormous popula- |
ton, but there is no city in Europe, |
as there are none of any size in Amer
III.
have to treat the sewage before dis
posing Of 1t.
The elaborate pumping stations |
which the sewer departments of New |
York and Chicago are obliged to main |
tain for sanitary reasons cost those |
cities thousands of dollars every year. |
while the treating plants in European
sewer systems are the most important |
and expensive parts of the systems
St Louis has none of this to contend |
with, having uneXcelled natural drain
age with river into which to empty
it's sewage, which is of such a charac-
ter that 1t purifies itself without arti-
fetal assistance. The sewage prob
lem is say engineers, one of the sim
plest with which ST. Louis has to deal,
for 1t practically solves itself. There
fore it Is all the more remarkable that
that city should be able to boast of
the largest sewer in existence. In
most instances great difficulties to be
overcome give rise to great results,
but here Is a case of great result
without the stimulus of a great diff
GUILTY, and the city should take all the