Overcoming Public Opposition to Water Meters

Autor: H. L. Meites
Rok vydání: 1936
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal - American Water Works Association. 28:1712-1715
ISSN: 0003-150X
DOI: 10.1002/j.1551-8833.1936.tb13809.x
Popis: Nowhere in the country is the question of water meters so acute, so important and so urgent as in Chicago. In fact, for a time it was made a campaign issue in the election for Mayor and a very able, conscientious Mayor was defeated because of his staunch belief in the merit of meterization; because he was honestly convinced that the only fair and adequate method of selling water in Chicago is through meters. It was his opinion that when Chicago has become completely meterized it will be possible to filter its water supply which is, at present, not of the very best. Public health authorities and the public generally are constantly demanding a higher standard of purity for domestic water supplies, and it is not to be expected that the people of Chicago will long be content with a supply which is inferior to that of other great cities of the world. It seems safe to predict, therefore, that in the not far distant future they will demand better water than is now being served and that the problem of a really pure, clean, and wholesome water supply with which the City has been struggling since its earliest days will be finally solved through filtration. For Chicago, Lake Michigan furnishes an inexhaustible quantity of water of a high degree of original purity. That the City has always had trouble with the quality of its water supply has been due principally to the vast amount of human and industrial wastes which Chicago itself and the neighboring cities and towns have discharged into the lake. As related to health, therefore, the problem has been largely to avoid and to prevent this pollution. The increasing quantities of filth to be disposed of, as both Chicago and the neighboring territory along the shores of the lake have grown in population and in industrial importance, and the more exacting requirements demanded in recent years by higher standards of purity have added greatly to the difficulties of the problem. Within the past few years efforts to avoid and to prevent pollution have been supplemented by treating the water with chlorine as a means of further purification.
Databáze: OpenAIRE