Who Is Dr. Theodor Escherich?

“One of the earliest problems of human civilization was keeping feces out of the water supply,” writes engineer Alice Outwater (pp 133-4).* “Almost without exception,” she continues, “cities were sited near lakes, streams, or springs, which supplied the citizenry with fresh water. As the population grew, runoff and daily dumping polluted the surface water, while waste from outhouses, cesspools, and stables seeped down to the groundwater. Before long, the lake or river would be undrinkable and the wells and springs tainted. Feces and water are both vectors for the transmission of many diseases, and cities are dangerous places to live unless clean water can be piped in from remote locations and wastewater can be piped out in sewers.”

Communities initiated water supply systems as protection against disease and fire. Private companies built the earliest city water supply systems, which they financed by selling bonds and charging householders an annual fee for hook-up. In 1849, for example, following opening of the Cochituate Aqueduct in Boston, there were 10,851 private subscribers and 750 fire hydrants. As cities increased in size, the cost of building water supply systems became so high that city governments assumed this function.

In the early 1800s, the City of Philadelphia, prompted by repeated yellow fever epidemics, hired English civil engineer Benjamin Latrobe to design the city water system. By 1837, the city had spent half a million dollars building a dozen miles of aqueducts and four reservoirs with a combined capacity of 22 million gallons, and laying over 98 miles of iron distribution pipes within the city. New York City, struck with a cholera epidemic in 1832, began work on the Croton Aqueduct system (Croton Dam, four reservoirs and about 50 miles of tunneled and bridged masonry aqueduct) at a total cost of over $10 million. Illinois in 1851 chartered the Chicago City Hydraulic Company to build a water system in Chicago to transport water from Lake Michigan to the city as protection against fire and disease (cholera epidemics occurred each summer between 1849 and 1855).** Public hydrants provided city residents with a free water supply even if they did not have a direct connection to their houses.

The increased availability of clean water piped directly into homes translated into increased wastewater production, which placed new demands on existing sewer systems originally built to divert rainstorm water into nearby waterways. When Boston officially became a city (1823), one of the first acts of its government was to take over ownership and control of the area’s sewers, often privately built by homeowners as household drainage for kitchen sinks.

Cities did not build the new sewers with feces in mind. Awareness of feces in wastewater came later as flush toilets changed the central role of sewers. In 1860, Boston boasted 6,500 flush toilets and 100 miles of city sewers. By 1885, the city had 100,000 toilets, 226 miles of sewers, and thousands of miles transporting wastewater and feces to municipal sewer mains 8 feet in diameter. (p. 141) Availability of clean water piped in from reservoirs and the advent of flush toilets resulted in an increase of per capita water consumption from approximately a dozen gallons/day to 100 gallons/day (the present rate).

In 1880 Louis Pasteur theorized that microorganisms cause disease. In 1884, German pediatrician Dr. Theodor Escherich examined human excrement under his microscope and identified Escherichia coli, a bacterium that is always present in the feces of healthy humans. This discovery led to the idea of using the amount of E. coli in waterways to signal that raw sewage, possibly containing feces from people sick with cholera, typhoid, and other infectious diarrheal diseases, had entered the clean water supply.

This idea had a profound impact on the nation’s municipal water systems. In 1872, Poughkeepsie, NY, which drank from a river (the Hudson) contaminated with raw sewage, built a sand filter, thus becoming the first American city with a filtered water supply. A filtered water supply, already established in Europe by the 1890s, resulted in sharp declines in the rates of cholera, typhoid fever and many other waterborne diseases, a finding that public health authorities duly noted. “Fecal coliforms” counts are still used today by municipal governments, in conjunction with standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency, as a screen for polluted water systems. (See Securitas: Aurora’s Boil Order: http://www.semp.us/archives/2004janfeb.pdf.)

Chicago lays claim to first disinfecting a public water supply with chlorine. In 1908, the Union Stockyard Company contracted with a private water supply company to provide the cattle with water from sewage-contaminated Bubbly Creek, which today is a highly contaminated, virtually unused tributary of the South Branch of the Chicago River. The Bubbly Creek Filter Plant filtered and cleaned the water with copper sulfate, which kills algae. Nevertheless, the cattle failed to gain enough weight and the stockyards again used city water. The City of Chicago sued the Union Stockyard Company for poaching municipal water, and the Bubbly Creek Filter Plant then substituted chloride of lime for copper sulfate. The cattle thrived and the water was cleaner than city water. Chlorination kills most microorganisms; when combined with filtration, the water supply becomes quite pure. Public health authorities during the first quarter of the twentieth century noted the difference in urban death rates from typhoid fever between communities using filtered and chlorinated water and communities that did not.

Even as disease-causing organisms were eliminated from waterways, chemical, paper, textile and other industries began dumping exotic new toxins into waterways. By the early 1960s, according to Outwater, the Calumet River, which empties into Lake Michigan, received a daily dose of about 100,000 pounds of oil, 35,000 pounds of ammonia, 3,500 pounds of phenols, and 3,000 pounds of cyanide from the industrial complex around Chicago, Gary, and Hammond (p. 154). [Michael Hawthorne, in his August 21, 2004 Chicago Tribune article titled “8 firms OK deal to clean Calumet,” notes that eight companies, including U.S. Steel, DuPont Co., BP Products North America, Exxon Mobil Corp, GATX Corp., and Georgia Pacific Corp., have agreed to pay $56 million to scour the Calumet River, “one of the nation’s most industrialized waterways and one of the most polluted sites on the Great Lakes.” Plans to decontaminate the river have been “in the works since the 1980s. But action has been delayed by negotiations between government lawyers and various companies accused of dumping pollution into the waterway for decades.” The idea is to scoop out the contaminated sediment and transfer it to a specially designed landfill near East Chicago.***]

In 1962, Rachel Carson’s blockbuster Silent Spring articulated a vision of potential “ecocatastrophe” and spawned the environmental movement we know well today.**** In 1965, Congress passed the Water Quality Act, which required development and application of water quality standards for all US waterways. In 1969, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1972, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act—commonly known as the Clean Water Act, which required every city in the US to build and operate a wastewater treatment plant. In 1974, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, which regulates the nation’s public drinking supply and its sources by establishing national health-based standards for drinking water.

*Alice Outwater: Water: A Natural History. Basic Books 1996.
** Ann Durkin Keating: Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002, p. 39.
***Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21, 2004, p. 14.
****Rachel Carson: Silent Spring. Mariner Books; 40th edition 2002.