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56
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 from the Southgate District to the Edmonton Boundary,
and at the points where these sewers cross the boundary there was in
each case a provision for measuring the flow of sewage from the Southgate
District into the Edmonton sewers. But one of these gauging chambers
has now been done away with, and for the. present 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 600,0001 gallons. The sludge from this reservoir and
the tanks is periodically pumped out on to the land, where (after drying)
it is ploughed in. The sewage then flows by gravitation over the northern
portion of the farm for preliminary treatment, and it is afterwards taken