Environmental Science & Engineering - www.esemag.com - January 2003
Comments? send them to the editor.
Drinking water - where more than
the price must be right
by Tom Davey, Editor
|
Willis Chipman
|
Consultants were again under
fire in Toronto, December
2002, over what some
claimed were “lavish fees”.
Unfortunately consulting engineers are
too often lumped in with the generic
term of consultant‚ which, these days,
covers a wide array of municipal services
not even remotely connected to engineering
services.
Environmental consulting engineers,
on the other hand, are part of one of the
oldest and largest learned professions in
Canada whose design skills are an integral
part of our water and wastewater
treatment infrastructure. Allegations of
lavish fees to me seem adjectivally inappropriate
for consulting engineers - a
profession whose skills were saving lives
long before many water-borne diseases
were identified by medical science.
Willis Chipman, for example, one of
Canada’s pioneer consulting engineers,
worked on water and wastewater systems
in many parts of Canada in the late
1800s before setting up the private consulting
practice of Chipman and Power
in 1901. Pioneering engineering consulting
firms brought “sanitary engineering”
to communities which were often
blighted with lethal water- borne diseases.
Sanitas is a Latin word for health
but, regrettably to my mind, environmental
engineering displaced the more accurate
term of sanitary engineering‚ in
the 1970s.
Neither the news media nor general
public are even remotely aware of the
contribution to public health by these
pioneer consulting engineers.
The pioneering work of a London
medical doctor, John Snow, should also
be honoured. Working alone, he correctly
identified cholera as a water-borne
disease around 1850, approximately the
same time Charles Dickens was writing
Bleak House. Dr. Snow had the handle
of the Broad Street water pump removed
and the cholera epidemic in that area
declined. Admittedly this was not conclusive
proof but certainly very respectable
evidence of a link between cholera
and tainted water. Dr. Snow’s findings
were dismissed by the British medical
elite who arrogantly and erroneously
proclaimed that cholera was an airborne
disease.
Dr. Snow did some of the earliest
epidemiological mapping in the world
which was never recognized in his day.
His published work on cholera was
poorly received and only a few copies
were sold. He was not invited to the
Royal Society, lost money on his cholera
publication and died in relative obscurity.
By comparison, 30 years later, when
Robert Koch identified the vibrio
cholerae, he received 100,000 Marks
from a grateful German government.
But the importance of the engineer’s
role was tragically highlighted in Ontario
by the Walkerton tragedy, frequently
and erroneously described as
Canada’s worst drinking water tragedy.
When nine people died and some 2,000
citizens were made seriously ill by E.
coli 0157:H7 from tainted water two
years ago, tragedy is certainly the appropriate
word.
But compare this to Hamilton, Ontario,
where, in 1854, a cholera epidemic
killed 552 of the city’s 14,000 inhabitants.
The remarkable Thomas Keefer,
who often worked in a consulting role,
designed a pumping station which is said
to have saved thousands of lives by being
able to draw purer water further offshore.
His pumping masterpiece was
restored in 1998 by the consulting firm
of UMA. It is now in pristine condition
so the public can see tangible evidence
of engineering which saved so many
lives.
Literally thousands of people died
from water-borne epidemics in the
1800s and 1900s. How many politicians
realize that the majority of our infrastructure
projects, which had a major
impact on public health, were designed
by consulting engineers working in liaison
with city engineers?
And on a very minor personal note,
this editorial marks one of over 90 editorials
and comments in the 15 years
since Environmental Science & Engineering
was founded. We do not envision
any lack of idiotic causes, or controversial
issues, to comment on over the
next few years. Public awareness of
the realities of the environmental sciences
seems to be a renewable resource,
worthy of consideration by the
Kyoto experts.
Abridged
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