City of Toronto Disposal of Sewage and Water Filtration

Mr. President and Gentlemen,

The subject that we have taken up today is, and ought to be, one of supreme and paramount interest to the whole business community of this large City, and it is no new subject; it is a subject which has been discussed at length; it is a subject which has been, off and on, before you for forty years; it is a subject which has been elucidated by reports from the ablest engineers of the world, and from engineers of eminence everywhere upon this continent. Bundles of reports have been made from time to time, which have been regularly and duly pigeon-holed, and the municipality, as a whole, has progressed with callous indifference to what it is doing, and the citizens have gone into a state of apathy, if not nausea, regarding this all-important question; as if it was something of interest only to those who were concerned in getting the public vote at certain periods and serving only a sort of quasi-political purpose. I approach the subject, believe me, trusting that you may see with me that it is one of vital importance to the progress and interest, as well as the sanitary bearings, of this City. Let me propound to you a proposition? Suppose that a great American corporation appeared at the doors of your City Hall, proposing they should pay a certain amount of money, and take from you the harbour which lies at your doors, and occupy it, or fill it in, or transform it for merchandisable purpose, and in that work also pollute your water supply so that it would be all but useless; fancy what an enormous howl there would be from every person interested in the growth of the City if such a proposition was nearing a material consummation, and yet, gentlemen, believe me, this is precisely what we are doing, and what we have been ourselves doing for over five and twenty years.

Many of you will remember when the shores of this harbour came close to the doors of the present situation of the Custom House. You will remember when the old furnaces used to draw the water supply of this City from Blockhouse Bay and distribute it among the citizens of Toronto, then a better water supply than we are receiving today; and yet by the indifference of the citizens at large, we are depositing within the harbour 25,000,000 gallons of sewage daily, filling it up with the output of the sewers, necessitating dredging at times in order to secure a waterway, utterly disregarding the value of that waterway as an asset of commercial importance; ignoring the sanitary possibilities of that grand sheet of water, that magnificent bay, a harbour which, I say, is unsurpassed in its beauty and grandeur by any harbour in the world, and a bay whose beauty can outrival even the Bay of Naples. Our harbour opens the door to pleasure excursions to inland waters, to steamboats of various kinds and for various purposes, maintains a lake traffic which does an enormous amount towards expanding and increasing the commerce and importance of the City of Toronto; and this asset, by the indifference of the citizens, is being frittered away or ignored.

Now, with that preamble, gentlemen, let us come down to business. :It has been time and time again proposed that the City of Toronto should do something with its sewage./ Well, do what? And if you can do anything, why don't you get up and do it? What are the difficulties? The chief difficulty is this, that every man thinks that he knows by intuition all the difficulties which beset the sewage disposal of the City of Toronto, as well as its water supply. Although scientific minds may have devoted their energies and carefully studied the question, although engineers thoroughly versed in such subjects may come forward with a proposition, you will always find an undertaker or a lobbyist, some man who probably is nothing more than a door-to-door canvasser, who will come out with a scheme which will settle forever the whole difficulty, surmounting engineering difficulties which take probably years to comprehend; and that individual will have his portion of followers and men who will contribute their quota towards confusing the clearness of the issue, That is one of the difficulties: No matter how eminent the engineer, no matter how he may stand unique in the world as an authority upon the question, no matter how eminent the scientist upon questions of water filtration and water purification, he might come here and spend days in discussing the details of the question and mastering its complexity, yet when he came down with his opinion, which would undoubtedly be the truth, based upon scientific facts, when the engineer would project his proposition which would be based on sound engineering reasoning and fact, I venture to say that it would not go unquestioned by the man least informed in the Council Board, who, because of his ignorance, could see no difficulties, and because of his density, could not grasp the value of the document which had been presented for his consideration. This, I take it, is not the attitude of the gathering I have the honour of addressing today.

We propose to cleanse the harbour. It can be done. I say with all the emphasis at my command it can be done. And I add further that if it is not done, the criminality of that neglect rests upon the shoulders of its citizens, and upon the business men of the community principally and chiefly. What do you propose? I propose to go to work at once and study the situation. Let us look for a moment at how our City is situated. When one is going to drain a house or drain a building he is going to study the typography of the situation and the ground. He sees here a large City with 300,000 of a population, surrounded upon all sides by hills, with two large rivers, one the Don, upon the east; one the Humber, extending into the farmyards of West York. These pour down their waters, one on either side of our landlocked harbour, and the citizens in their turn have continued to pour, by the openings of multitudinous sewers, their slime and filth into this landlocked harbour. The land appears to slope largely to the east. There appears to be a larger amount of natural drainage eastward than westward. We need a supply of wholesome drinking water, and, with great scientific knowledge and foresight, we shove our pipe through the centre of the harbour and go just beyond the line of the sand limitation of the Island to draw our supply of wholesome drinking water. That is where we are, and that is where we have been for thirty years. As we have grown in population we have eradicated the pesthouse and the pit from our midst and we have turned them into our sewers, which, in turn, deliver the same filth down to our shore, and then we go along this beautiful waterfront and we pile it up with sand and gravel and old pipe and junk, and here and there a pile of coal, until, when we look at it as we come in on the deck of a steamboat, we say "Whither are we drifting?"

My recommendation for you is to clean this all out. Put the sewage somewhere else, and so treat it that it will cease to be sewage. Apply the scientific principles which have been practised and adopted by the most capable cities in the world. Adopt those principles to our conditions, so that we will receive from them the best results, and accept only that which has been tested and proven and found to be true by prolonged experience, use and adaptation. Can you do that? Well, I think we can. The City Engineer, for whom I have the greatest respect (and about whom I intend to say a word), after a very thorough and conscientious and careful study of many systems in the old world, sent there by the municipality to study that question, came back, and I am sorry to say, after that tour of inspection and those months of work, said: "These systems of sewage treatment are fine. They are undoubtedly in many instances satisfactory, but in a new country such as this, in a community where it is so difficult to raise the tax-rate for necessary work, I am afraid the process is too expensive for the City of Toronto, and therefore I would recommend the City to construct a sewer, somewhere, nine miles from the seat of the intake pipe and, somewhere, three miles east of Victoria Park, and there be satisfied to pour the crude sewage of 300,000 people into the waters of Lake Ontario." I do not know what you may think, as business men, but as a man claiming to have some knowledge of the sanitary needs of a community, and the sanitary rights of adjacent communities, I felt at least it was my bounden duty to exercise every force and every emphasis at my command to protest in the strongest, in the stoutest and most effective way, against what I venture to characterize as the most unscientific and the most proposterous plan for dealing with the sewage disposal of a City that I had ever heard. I believe I was instrumental in delaying that project.

I hardly need waste your time in discussing its merits or demerits. Suffice it to say that it was proposed to construct a sewer east of the Woodbine, through a municipality into which we have no right of entry, pour that sewage upon a shore which we do not own, and which we have no right to pollute, go farther and deposit it into the waters of Lake Ontario, which the Provincial Government doubtless would take every measure to protect in a certain sense, and leave it there to be wrestled with by legal enactment, and by all the other conditions which would raise questions and leave us submerged in a condition of complication, with, I fear, an unfinished and uncompleted work. Then we go before the people with a proposition to construct a sewer up to a certain point, to Woodbine Avenue, and there to stop, to do something of which we cannot tell what the end will be. To commence a sewer and end it in a secret pouch; to finish that sewer by blocking the end; and to ask the people for $3,000,000, I think it was, in order to carry out that work, work which, as the press said, was never proposed to be completed, a sewer which began somewhere and ended no man could say where! And I am not surprised that in this community, distinguished for its educational institutions and for its common intelligence, they should reject en bloc this scheme as being unprofitable and unsatisfactory. This they did. After having had all that opposition we have gone back to consider the question upon a scientific, and, I think, satisfactory basis. We find that the people are not ready to accept any proposition which has not upon the surface of it an evidence of completeness and satisfactory working capability, and I believe that there is no use whatever in submitting such a question to the citizens of Toronto, unless it will stand the criticism of scientists and capable engineers everywhere. I do believe it is only a question of whether or not the system is going to be unquestionably satisfactory, perfect and complete. Guarantee that and the people will be able to give any reasonable amount to carry our scheme to perfection, and to remove forever the pollution of the harbour and the contamination of our drinking water. That, I take it, is the attitude of our people.

Now we are coming forward for your support with a proposition which I am prepared to bring before any audience, and defend in every detail, as putting once and for all the two questions beyond peradventure-the purification of the harbour and the purification of our drinking water. You cannot discuss one without entering upon the other. You cannot pollute the one without polluting the other. The water supply of the City of Toronto is drawn from a supply of water communicating freely with the water of the harbour and, with every change of wind, these waters are drifted hither and thither until the man who pretends to consider and discuss the sewage disposal of this city without discussing the supply of water for the city is simply discussing one side of the question, and leaving the other to take care of itself. I do not care where you construct sewers as long as you sink them deep enough to provide a proper gradient and run them along the streets which will drain the city most satisfactorily. The sewers now proposed are those that almost every engineer has agreed upon as in the best positions. The old text laid down for these sewers was in the Report of Messrs. Herring & Gray, of New York; who reported upon this question when Mr. E. F. Clarke was first Mayor, and they brought out what might be considered the standard Report upon which all subsequent reports were, more or less, based. Unfortunately, these eminent engineers recommended at that time to put the sewage crude into the waters of the Lake. But we had not advanced then where we have now, and the forms of treatment of sewage were not so thoroughly and completely understood. They tell us, and they have written letters upon this very question, that had they to consider the question again, they would certainly not recommend the deposition of crude sewage, untreated and unchanged, into the waters of Lake Ontario.

These sewers it is proposed to run, one a high level, and the other a low level, along the front below Queen Street, on probably Farley Avenue, and extending from Parkdale west of the Exhibition; running the main sewer right along on a line with Adelaide Street, and then extending it along with another low level sewer below that, near the water front, and continuing them as far as the Woodbine. That is the course planned for the construction of the pipes. The point is, "What are you going to do when it comes here?" It appears to me that Ashbridge's Bay offers the natural point for the treatment of that sewage. Why? It is a huge marsh. We have probably in all some thirteen hundred acres of foul marshland unreclaimed, which will ever be unreclaimed, and stand increasing in pollution as years go on. It is low lying. On the side of it we have enormous banks of sand ready at band, as if suggested by nature for the sand treatment of the filth, that naturally and always, sewer or no sewer, will congregate into that landlocked bay. The land does not require to be purchased. What I propose to do, and what the Engineer now is agreed to recommend is, that we bring the sewage down there and put down septic tanks and bacteria filter beds (call them contact beds if you like), so that we will treat and filter our sewage, and discharge the effluent by a longextended pipe into the Lake. This effluent will be quite clear enough and clean enough for the ordinary citizen to drink with impunity, and if we can accomplish that there will be no complaint from the people in the neighbourhood.

You say that is all very fine, but how are you going to do this? Let me show you the details of these sewers. We spoke of septic tanks and filter beds. Septic tanks to the ordinary man have little meaning; he thinks they are merely a series of tanks. It is the tank system started in England and experimented with in Exeter. They constructed the tanks, some entirely dark and others so arranged that there was an abundant admission of light at all times, and they kept the sewage there without allowing it to escape. It would be put into the tank and there kept in order to see what would be the effect, and it was found, and this point has been pretty generally substantiated by all subsequent observers, very many of whom were much opposed to the septic tank treatment, that the sewage is subject to the action of certain bacteria. A bacterium is a minute micro-organism. It is, if you like, a vegetable fungus. It has the power (and this is the point where so many people go wrong), it has the power of eating up all organic effluvia. Everything that contains albumen it is the bacteria's business to eat, and where the bacteria are there you will find the sewage, where the car case is there will be found the ravens gathered together, and these bacteria will eat that sewage if you give them time enough, until every vestige of it is gone, until no matter how concentrated the sludge may be, no matter how much solid matter there may be, if you give those bacteria long enough time, they will devour every atom of it and leave the fluid to flow off without them, and this bacterial theory is essential to all forms of life. Without the action of bacteria you could have no decomposition, no fertilization, the farmer might sow his seed in vain, and might fertilize his land to the end of all time without results; for in carrying a fertilizer into his field, he does nothing more than carry the pabulurri on which the bacteria can live and where they can grow and multiply and prosper, in order that they may fertilize his grain and render the crop still greater.

Look at the work in the Agricultural Colleges through out the country today, read the accounts of the experiments with alsike and various forms of clover; go to Guelph, and open the laboratories and see how they are carrying on that very work to know how they can grow double the amount of grain upon the same amount of earth, increase the number of peas inside the pod, produce a product which will nourish the stock on one-half of the cultivation and one-quarter the 'amount of grain, and they will tell you it is by understanding how to plant upon the roots of that very growing thing those bacteria which are necessary for its fertilization. It is the go between which picks up the material and shoves it into the clover and enables the plant to grow and become fruitful. We intend to give those bacteria all they can eat, and urge them to eat still more. We intent to house them, if we can, in the septic tanks and when the bacteria have gorged themselves until they become inactive, then we will have what we speak of as clarified or treated sewage, which, I will frankly admit, is not pure, which even the most critical will tell you still contains 50 percent of polluted matter. His Worship the Mayor recently said, "Is that going into Lake Ontario? If so, I will not support it." No, it is not. We are going to take the 50 percent, glad to get half way upon this question, and submit it again to a still further change, and that change is to throw the effluent upon the surface of a filter bed, so that it can be filtered and drained by properly constructed underdrains and there will not be a vestige of polluted matter left to run into the Lake.

What about this filter bed? I have a lot to say about it. It is a bed which is housed in a concrete box. It will be fifty feet wide and one hundred feet long. It will be walled in with concrete, it will have a bottom of concrete, and there will be enough beds to handle the whole sewage, and the sewage can be handled efficiently and perfectly with 100,000 gallons to the acre, and indeed some high authorities say it can be handled quite satisfactorily in the quantity of 500,000 gallons to the acre. In Brockton, Mass., I wandered over a bed similarly constructed. I had on a pair of low shoes. They had no septic tank. They delivered an enormous quantity of sewage there, something like 30,000,000 gallons of sewage per day; threw it upon these filter beds composed of sand and gravel and coarse stone about five feet deep; and I was astonished to find that upon the banks of those beds there were people picnicking, and after the sewage has been run off in all its enormous volume I walked over the bed within one-quarter of an hour and even the tops of my shoes were in no way soiled.

To a man who looks upon a sewage plant as an open privy pit this is something that he cannot grasp, but it simply means that he does not grasp the infinite possibility of a modern scientific sewage plant, and the man who has not seen such a plant can never grasp its character or its value. We propose to put such a thing as that down here after we have had the septic tank. We want the septic tanks to save ground, time and expense; we want to get the work which those bacteria will do done within that tank, and then our filter bed will act more quickly and we will not require so many filter beds. These filter beds you can make of various kinds of material; some are made of cinders, some of slag, some of sand. They are, on the average, about four feet, six inches deep, bottomed with concrete, and on the bottom of that concrete we have a drain laid, and into that main drain we have collective feed tiles, and these drains, which may be six inches, some of them nine inches, discharge into the Lake the effluent clarified and purified. A mixture of fine sand, coarse sand, fine gravel; coarse gravel, or broken stone, five feet deep on the top, or broken slag, which is probably easier to get in some localities, and which has a number of spongy interstices, is used and, as the water trickles down, the flow is retarded and the solid matter is retained in the interstices; and the same process goes on in the septic tank; the bacteria which are present, and which require air for their maintenance, devour completely all the organic substance.

What flows through after the bacteria is not the albuminous matter or the sludge of sewage; that has been too precious to the bacterial life, but the fluid which was the fluid of suspension wherein the substance was contained will be allowed, free from both bacteria and the deposit, to pass through the bottom of the bed and into the drain; and it will be a fluid which the most critical of the process will admit contains at the worst but, 10% of organic matter and which Percy Franklin, the great authority of Europe, states, will contain not g% of organic impurity or bacterial life. If we had our water supply of the City of Toronto as pure as that you would never have occasion to hear from the Health Officer complaining of its condition, and there is no scientist upon this continent who would dare to question its value or its purity. It would be free and open to all to drink freely without danger or restriction. Give me that, and I am prepared to endorse it to the fullest. That is the scheme which we have proposed and are going to submit. We are going to have our sewers out there. We are going to put our septic tanks there, and we are going to make, in addition to our septic tanks, filter beds, so that sewage can be treated and filtered, and you will never have from it any smell. You will never have occasion to remark the filthiness of the water, or find that your white-painted boat will have a streak on it if you try to cross the Bay in it.

About the cost; what do you suppose all that filtering process is worth? It is going to handle in the neighbourhood of forty million gallons of sewage a day. It is going to add to the cost of the plant about $940,000, so that without that addendum we will be able to have a sewage plant which will cost you about two and a half million dollars; and with that you will be able to have a sewage plant which will cost you three and a half million dollars. Now, I would like to know which you would prefer if it were your own. Do you prefer a thing about which you would have grave doubts and question, though you save a third of the cost, or would you be prepared to sit down and say: " This is a vital question to my life and to my health; I want to know how much money will be the beginning and the end, and when I have paid it, to have something on which I can rest contented and bank with absolute certainty. Give me that." Such will, I think, be the attitude of the people of this city, and for that reason I advise the legislators at the City Hall to go before the people with a complete and perfect system, and never mind the cost. The people would rather pay a million dollars more to have what is perfect than two-thirds of the amount to find to their chagrin and annoyance that what they paid two and a half million dollars for has turned out imperfect. . The best engineers will say that the plan I have presented is the most highly satisfactory, and will indorse it in every respect.

I want to go further. After I have got your sewage disposed of, I may still have to tell the newspapers to " boil your water." I don't propose to come up against criticism unprepared, and I tell you my conviction on that question is that if we carried our sewage to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and poured it there into the blue ocean, there would still be times when it would be incumbent upon me to warn the citizens that the water of Lake Ontario was unfit for domestic use and needed to be boiled. We are pretty dirty sometimes in the City of Toronto, but we are not prepared to say that all the filth that goes into Lake Ontario comes from our shores. I have told you what the Don carries in its waters, and the Humber, with its barn-yards and piggeries. They are blocked by the ice in the spring, and then with a rush we have the whole of this filth slushed out, and we get a modicum of it at the intake pipe close by, and that is not the only pollution close at hand. What about the municipalities that abut the shores of Lake Ontario? What about the city to the west of us at the head of Lake Ontario? What about the sewage contamination that travels down the Niagara River? What about the cities on the south shore, increasing in population, increasing in manufacturing importance, increasing in the volume and density of sewage, and sewage, with a wind, will travel forty or fifty miles, and quite far enough to reach our intake pipe. In order to put this question for once and forever at an end, I venture to couple with these proposals the recommendation that the drinking water of the City of Toronto should be filtered. The city should have a drinking water supply above question. It is a menace to the progress and the prosperity of this community to be constantly reminding the people abroad that the citizens of Toronto have to boil their drinking water. I want a drinking water which will stand for itself, so that the sojourner within our gates can drink it without feeling for the next three weeks that he has twitches all through his alimentary canal; and I believe that if we could get rid of that bugbear it would be worth a couple of million dollars. For this reason I propose to put upon the Island a filter for our drinking water. There is a natural collection of sand; we have land in abundance; we have to pump our water very little, and we would maintain a covered filter bed, covered because the water is lower in temperature than sewage would be, and put it through precisely the same kind of filtering that Professor Coke recommended for the city of Hamburg. He went there at the instigation of the German Government to investigate the cause of the prevalence of cholera, and he found that the cholera in many cases was on one side of the street and not on the other, because on one side the people used filtered water and on the other side water not filtered. Since they have been using filtered water there has never been another case, and Hamburg today has its portals open and its shipping uninterefered with, and its people free from the ravages of that dread disease.

I want a filtering plant for our water; I want a plant which can be maintained at all time and run at all times without interference. I am asked, will this filter bed work? How often are you going to renew it? I want to show you what Professor Coke demonstrated in Hamburg. Here is your filter of sand and gravel; the efficacy rests in the film that forms on the surface. This film-it may be of coarsely coagulated albumen-regulates the rapidity of the filtering process, maintains the continuity of the work, and must not be materially interfered with. It will extend six or seven inches through the filtering plant, and it will work for fifty years without renewal, without interference, without transformation, without change. I do not say it will work quite so long for sewage, but it will work for many, many years undisturbed, unrenewed. The cost of maintenance is trifling. I will grant you, if frost gets in so as to freeze the whole mass solid so that there will be upheaval of it, and cracks and fissures through its substance, the results will be serious, but we propose to surmount that difficulty by having it covered, so as to render danger from frost inoperative, and then all you have to do is to let it alone, to see that the water is not thrown upon it so as to disturb the great mass of the filtering bed.

In case foreign substance lodges upon it, it may be necessary with a garden rake to quietly and gently go over it and loosen here and there an inch or half an inch of the surface, so as to allow complete settlement into the deeper parts of the bed, and that must .be all. I do not think that is required in connection with water filtration, but it is required sometimes in connection with sewage filtration, and when you get that you can see how much it will require to operate it. A couple of men would look after the whole question of water filtration. The cost is not in the attendance, it is in the cost of pumping the water or the sewage. It is necessary in our case to lift that water up on to the Island ten or twelve feet; so also it will be necessary regarding our sewage. There is one point that will come up. Some will say we tried this before, we tried filtering. Oh yes, I will tell you how you tried it. If you had been there six years ago you would have seen it. The man who undertook the scheme dug a big hole in the sand, then he proposed that the water should filter through there and soak into that basin. He constructed a basin in the sand, and then he proposed to pump the water from the basin or allow a drain to carry it off and run it to the well at the bottom of John Street, so that the filtering consisted in soaking through a narrow portion of soil. The idea of filtration was entirely submerged in such a hole. There was no film; he did not know anything about film. It was a hole in the sand, with no thought of the lake level, which changes as the months go on. To get over the whole difficulty he sent out men to dig trenches so that the water would run completely through. Instead of getting the deeper water he would be satisfied with the sun-warmed and filthy surface water, which is always more polluted than the deep water. Because the attainments of the mind that conceived such a gigantic farce were not able to give scientific and satisfactory effects we are asked to condemn the whole system of scientific and satisfactory working of water filtration, as if it had ever been really tried for this community.

I have been superficial, I grant you, but you can take my word for it that if the people of the City of Toronto will wake up and adopt, our plan, and carry it out thoroughly and satisfactorily, they will never have any reason to regret it, and they will find the work a complete one, which will continue to operate satisfactorily, and which will thoroughly and completely dispose of the sewage of this city, and which wilt protect the drinking water of the City of Toronto beyond any possibility of a question. And I might say that this is not wholly a local question. It is a question of interest, not only to the pity of Toronto, but of interest to the whole Province of Ontario--indeed, the whole of this country, for municipalities everywhere are struggling with similar conditions. They are attempting, because of their penuriousness, to pollute the water at their shores. At practically every meeting of the Provincial Board of Health we have some municipality proceeding to throw its crude sewage on the shores, and then asking us in two or three years what we can do to arrest--an epidemic. They say if a big, rich, prosperous community like the City of Toronto are doing this, why cannot we? Looking at the question in its broadest sense, here we have certainly a grand city, the banner municipality of this province, in a great country of which we have every reason to be proved, a country which has been resplendent in the fertility of its soil--a soil anticipating the husbandman's richest desires. Are not these facts sufficient to inspire with hope and with pride every born Canadian, and yet we must defile the whole situation for five and twenty years or longer by making the magnificent harbour of this worldrenowned Lake, pure in its intent, and in its inception grand, little more than a vile, polluted spot next door to a sewer.