FOUL WATER FOR PHILADELPHIA.
The Philadelphia medical inspectors who have been making an investigation of the sources of pollution along the Schuylkill river have made many discoveries. For instance, at Norristown, a city of 25,000 inhabitants, all of the sewage flows into the Schuylkill, undiluted, unfiltered, untreated. Below that city there are but two clean streams of any size that contribute to the Schuylkill supply, namely. Mill creek and the Wissaliickon. But, combined, they would not equal the flow of Norristown’s unadulterated sewage supply that discolors and renders the river offensively odorous for miles. Norristown is only nine miles from one of Philadelphia’s pumping stations and from twelve to sixteen miles from four others, which supply about three-fourths of the city’s entire water. Norristown is literally transversed, almost honeycombed, with a series of open sewers. Although these appear on the map as “creeks,” they are nothing more or less than open sewers of the foulest and most loathsome kind, without even the redeeming feature of the rapid movement of the material in every wellconstructed, covered sewer, so graded as to carry off the offensive sewage as rapidly as possible, and before it has time to decay
