Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1897 — The Disposal of Sewerage. [ARTICLE]

The Disposal of Sewerage.

Dr. J. N. Hurty, secretary of the state board of health was lately at Winamac to advise the authorities of that town as to the best manner of disposing of the sewerage of the ;own. He advised the use of a sewer bed. These beds are composed of a gravel three and a half or four feet deep under-laid with drain tile. The method of building them is to either excavate a pit, if the fail is sufficient to hold that depth of gravel, lay a center of drain tile, with side laterals and one around the outer edge. If the fall is not great enough to permit of the bed being made into a pit, it is built on the surface of the groand with a dyke around it. The sewerage as it runs from the

sewer, is spread over the gravel and soon disappears. After the sewerage begins to spread down and through the gravel a miscrcscopical vegetable life begins to grow and spread until the entire gravel bed is filled with it. This vegetable life absorbs and destroys all animal and vegetable matter found in the foul water that sinks into the gravel. The destruction is so complete that no effluvia arises from the bed and the water that flows from it is purer than the unfiltered river water. In winter tjhe beds do not freeze and the

sewerage, having an average temperature of sixty degrees, sinks into the gravel before any ice is formed even in the most severe weather. The Brockton, Mass., beds are surrounded with nice lawns and hedges and on some of them grain crops were growing. At the outlet pipes tin cups were hanging and the employes drank the escaping water in preference to the river water, believing it to be the purer, and analysis showed that to be the case. It was thought that a bed 100 feet square would be large enough for Winamac.