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57
SECTION III.
SEWERAGE AND DRAINAGE.
I am much indebted to our Engineer and Surveyor, Mr. Cuthbert Brown,
for his kind help with this section.
There are 3 earth closets in the district, 1 pail closet at a cottage and
16 pail closets at a factory. Otherwise the whole of the district is provided
with water closets.
The district is sewered on the separate system. The surface water is
conveyed into the Pymmes and Salmons Brooks, whilst the sewage proper,
together with that of the neighbouring district of Southgate, passes to the
Council's sewage farm of 235 acres, where it is treated by broad irrigation.
Mr. Frank Rackham is the farm bailiff. The population whose sewage is
treated on this farm, consists of 98,409 persons according to the last census;
that is 64,797 persons in Edmonton and 33,612 in Southgate Urban district.
The Sewage Farm. The whole of the land rests on the blue clay at
a depth below the surface varying from about 14 feet to about 40 feet; above
the blue clay is a bed of gravel, supposed to have been washed down from
the Southgate Hills and deposited in the valley. The sewage which comes
from the district of Southgate is brought by three main sewers to the Edmonton
Boundary. The two Councils have agreed on terms which do away with the
necessity of any monthly gaugings of the flow of sewage from Southgate into
Edmonton. The three sewers are called the northern, middle and southern
sewers. The middle joins the southern in Edmonton, and all the mains meet
at the west end of Town Road, passing down Town Road in a common outfall
sewer to the pumping station. This outfall sewer, which is a brick, egg-shaped
sewer, is joined at the pumping station by a low-level iron pipe sewer, which
does not extend as far as the Southgate district, but takes the houses built on
the low-lying ground west of Cambridge main line of the Great Eastern
Railway and those in the district adjoining Tottenham. The sewage is delivered
at the farm into an underground reservoir of a capacity of 2,000,000 gallons,
and is lifted into three subsiding tanks of a total capacity of 600,000 gallons.
The sludge from this reservoir and the tanks is periodically pumped out on to
the land, where (after drying) it is ploughed in. In February the Allotment
Holders' Association made an offer to take the sludge on to their ground. The
sewage then flows by gravitation over the northern portion of the farm for
preliminary treatment, and it is afterwards taken by carriers to a gravel pit of
an area of 3½ acres for further purification before being allowed to pass down
the effluent channel into the River Lea. In addition to the works which I have
enumerated, there is a low-level pumping station at Angel Road, which