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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 12

Chapter VI. — Drainage

Chapter VI.

Drainage.

It may be said that a limited natural drainage is the only one Dunedin possesses. It is true a large sewer drains Rattray Street gully into the Bay, and that another is in process of construction along St. Andrew Street and York Place; but these, of course, are wholly inadequate for the drainage of a city of 1,000 acres.

The evil results of this state of matters are, that our sewage poisons our houses, our streets are filthy, and our flat in many parts is a saturated mass of pollution.

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Your City Surveyor in 1872 submitted a plan to the Council for the drainage and sewerage of the City. His method of drainage, so far as I can judge, is admirable, though I don't agree with him in his statement that the Bay is the best outfall for sewage; but this I shall refer to when placing before you the scheme that has occurred to me regarding the disposal of our sewage.

Another, and I think, perhaps, a better plan, has been suggested to you by Mr. Burt, C.E., in which he proposes to divert the Water of Leith for the flushing of a main sewer, which he suggests will run by the Bay, being continued along the Anderson's Bay Road, having its outfall directly into the ocean.

I proposed to Mr. Burt a modification of his plan regarding the outfall into the ocean, with which he cordially agreed. What that modification is I will state in the chapter on Sewage.*

* Since writing the above, I have witnessed, under premises pulled down in Rattray Street, a great accumulation of decomposed water, which had collected there and failed to escape through there being no drainage. Animal matter was there breeding pestilence by its decay.