USA > Michigan > Wayne County > Detroit > The city of Detroit, Michigan, 1701-1922, Vol. I > Part 39
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For a century after Cadillac founded the settlement of Detroit, the question of securing clean, fresh water was one which did not puzzle the inhabitants. It flowed past their doors in abundant quantity and all that was necessary was a bucket. No contamination existed to spoil the water and imperil the health of the community, nor were there any restrictions upon the amount each person might use. Sometime later, when barrels were placed upon the wharf, the village authorities levied a tax of one dollar upon those who took water from this supply. The public wells did not come in until after the fire of 1805. These wells were dug and pumps installed at advantageous points in the village and were of great convenience, although some opposition was encountered regard- ing those upon the Campus Martius as so many people and cattle fell into them. The old two-wheeled French cart, with its water barrels, and the yoke by which a person might carry a bucket upon each end, were common sights in the streets of Detroit during the early days. From 1820 until 1822 the question of public "water works" was discussed by the officials, but nothing ever came of it.
The first attempt toward an improvement in the method of securing water was made by the governor and council, when, in 1824, they passed an act authoriz- ing Peter Berthelet "to erect a wharf on the Detroit River in continuation of Randolph Street, and running to the ship channel of said river, provided the said Peter Berthelet, his heirs and assigns, shall, at all times during the existence of the grant, at his own, or their own, expense, erect, make and repair, at some convenient place at or near the end of said wharf, next the channel of the river, a good and sufficient pump, at which all persons who may reside within the city of Detroit, shall be, at all times, free of wharfage or other expenses, entitled to take and draw water for their use and convenience; and for that purpose a free use of said wharf shall be given for carts, wagons, sleighs or other machinery to be used in drawing and carrying away the water." The dock and pump were built and remained until 1835, when the city council removed the property.
In 1825 Bethuel Farrand, father of Jacob S. Farrand, submitted to the council a plan for a water works system, and the official body authorized him to put his scheme into execution. He, with Rufus Wells, cut tamarac logs from the banks of
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the ('linton River in the summer of 1825, with which to construct pipes, but within a short time after the work was begun, Wells bought out Farrand's in- terest and in March, 1827 the council passed an ordinance granting to Rufus Wells "the sole and exclusive right of watering the city of Detroit." Mr. Wells erected on the Berthelet wharf at the foot of Randolph Street a pump house twenty feet square, with a cupola forty feet high, in which was a large cask, to which the water was raised by two pumps of five-inch bore each, operated by horse power. From this the water was conveyed in tamarac logs to a reser- voir which stood where the present water works office is, corner Jefferson Avenue and Randolph Street. The reservoir was sixteen feet square and six feet deep, with a capacity of 9,580 gallons.
The original act of the council was repealed in 1829 and a new one was passed granting to Mr. Wells and three associates, known collectively as the Hy- draulie Company, the exclusive right of supplying the city with water until 1850, and this was afterward extended to 1865. During this ownership, the purity of the water from the river was questioned and with the view of finding a purer supply, the boring of a well was undertaken. It was extended to a depth of 260 feet and then abandoned.
In 1830 the company constructed a new reservoir, near the southeast corner of Wayne and Fort Streets, with a capacity of 21,870 gallons. Water pipes, made of wood with a three-inch bore, were laid from the river to Jefferson Avenue, and the new works went into service August 21, 1830. The water was pumped by means of a small engine located on the southwest corner of Jefferson and Cass Avenues. A year later a second reservoir, holding about 120,000 gallons, was built. The first reservoir remained in use until 1839, and the second one per- formed intermittent duty until as late as 1842. This company continued its operations in spite of the fact that the enterprise was carried on at a financial loss. But there were still complaints of an inadequate supply of water, and in 1836 a committee reported to the common council that the company had for- ยท feited its rights and privileges, and that the grant had become null and void and reverted to the corporation. The city then took possession and paid the old company $20,500 for its visible property.
UNDER CITY CONTROL
The city then for fifteen years ran the works, through committees of the com- mon council, amidst complaints of mismanagement, inadequate supply, and an annual deficit in the treasury amounting for the period to $85,125. At last, in 1852, the works were turned over to a board of five trustees and one year later, by legislative aet, this board was renamed the board of water commissioners, was appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the common council. For nearly sixty years this board had charge of the water works. Under the city charter adopted in 1918 the appointment and removal of commissioners has rested with the mayor, without reference to the common council. The city has been fortun- ate in securing for membership upon this board eminent citizens who have served with zeal and good judgment and without compensation. During the forty- seven years after the board was created, it had only four presidents: Edmund A. Brush, who served twenty-six years; Alexander D. Fraser, three years; Chauncey Hurlbut, twelve years; and Jacob S. Farrand, six years. Mr. Hurlbut not only gave to the city unstinted and memorable service, but left to the board a considerable legaey, the income from which is expended in beautifying the
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present water works grounds. Since the conclusion of Mr. Farrand's term as president in 1890, that office has generally gone from year to year to the com- missioner whose term was the next to expire. Under the old system of control and management, there was eonstant complaint of an inadequate supply of water. But the new board, with wise foresight, generally kept ahead of demands and even ahead of popular appreciation of what the demand was likely to be. For only a short time in the last decade, then on account of the rapid growth of the city, has the capacity of the works and mains been short of the requirements.
There could hardly be a more striking illustration of the growth of Detroit than that furnished by a little exhibition of iron pipe at the north end of the water works building. In 1830 a pipe three inches in diameter carried the city's supply, and this served for ten years. In 1840, a ten-inch main was laid and this was sufficient for fourteen years. In 1854, a twenty-four-inch main was laid from the works on Orleans Street to Clinton, and in 1856 it was extended to the reservoir at Wilkins and Orleans Streets, a mile and half from the river. In 1875 the first forty-two-ineh main was laid and the maximum of forty-eight inches was reached a few years later. The first iron pipes were laid in 1838. along Jefferson Avenue from Randolph to Woodward Avenue.
When the city first took over the water works system, purchase was made of "Antoine Dequindre of three water lots in front of the Dequindre farm, with a front of 350 feet on the river for $5,500," and the work of building started in- mediately. In 1837, a year later, the building of the reservoir at the foot of Orleans Street was begun. This reservoir, or "round house" as it was called, was circular, fifty feet high in brick, with an additional twenty feet in wood. The iron tank inside was twenty feet high and sixty feet in diameter, and was in the upper part of the building; it had a capacity of 422,979 gallons. This reservoir was used until 1857, and then after three years' partial use was aban- doned, and torn down in 1866. It is said that this old round house was copied by Noah Sutton from the old Manhattan Works of New York City.
Property upon the Mullett farm was purchased in 1851 as a site for an ad- ditional reservoir, but this action aroused so much opposition that after the water works came under the control of the board of commissioners this property was sold. In 1854 ten acres were bought on the Dequindre farm, a mile and a half from the river, and a new reservoir begun on the property. This reservoir, which was completed in 1860, was bounded by Wilkins, Calhoun, Riopelle and Dequindre Streets, and consisted of two basins enclosed by a thirty-foot, sloping clay embankment, 103 feet thick at the base and 15 feet wide at the top. Each of the two basins was 200 feet square at the top, 114 feet square at the bot- tom and 281/2 feet deep. The capacity of the two basins was 9,000,000 gallons. In 1858 a new intake pipe was sunk, with the end 175 feet from the wharf-line and thus a better and cleaner supply of water could be obtained.
REMOVAL OF THE WORKS
In the early '70s, agitation commenced for the removal of the water works. The Orleans Street lot was too small for a second pumping station, which would soon be needed. There was danger of contamination of the water at that point by the construction of factories and sewer outlets above, and there was grave danger from fire, as the works were near lumber yards, and close by the Grand Trunk car shops which contained a large amount of inflammable material. The latter danger was emphasized by the destruction of the Chicago water works
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in the great fire of 1871. Two years of warm discussion followed in the city and in the legislature, to which it was necessary to go for permissive legislation. In January, 1874, a tract of fifty-nine acres was purchased from Robert P. Toms. It extended from Jefferson Avenue to the river and was four miles from the city hall. To this an adjoining traet of forty aeres has since been added and all compose the water works park as the city now knows it.
The first equipment here included a pumping station with two engines, boiler house, storage shed with navigable canal leading to it from the river for the transportation of coal, a settling basin 365 by 775 feet, and an intake pipe sixty inches in diameter and 1,100 feet in length, taking water from a depth of 22 feet. There was also a standpipe 124 feet high, encircled by a pressed brick tower. After a few years, the use of the latter was discontinued, the water being pumped directly into the mains.
The purchase of the new site was not without opposition, however, and the matter was not definitely settled until a formal report was made by investigators as to the desirability of the location. Work upon the new plant was begun in December, 1874 and completed in three years. Water was first supplied there- from on December 15, 1877. There were, in the engine house at first, three engines, all designed by John E. Edwards. One of them was first used in 1877, having been built by the Detroit Locomotive Works; another was completed in 1881 at the Riverside Iron Works, and in 1SS5 the third was finished.
EXTENSIVE ENLARGEMENTS
In the subsequent period, enlargements have been made in every direction to keep up with the rapidly growing demands. A new intake tunnel was pro- jected to a point above the head of Belle Isle, where the Detroit River leaves Lake St. Clair, the water there being twenty-eight feet deep. Pipe extensions were made in every direction, a second pumping station was built and several new engines added to the equipment. At the end of the fiscal year 1918, there were in operation three engines with a capacity of 24,000,000 gallons of water daily, three with 25,000,000 gallon capacity and four that pump 30,000,000 gallons each, a total daily capacity of 267,000,000 gallons. Two additional engines, each with a daily capacity of 37,000,000 gallons, were ordered that year, to be completed as soon as war conditions would permit. The total quantity of water pumped was nearly 53,000,000,000 gallons, of which over one-half was metered. The meter service has since been extended so as to cover more than nine-tenths of the system. Notwithstanding a large increase in population, the amount of water pumped fell off the next year over 4,000,000,000 gallons, but a year later mounted over the 55,000,000,000 point. The distributing system according to recent figures, includes 1,328 miles of pipe, of all sizes ranging up to 48-inch mains. The number of service connections in 1919 was 154,207, which number has since been proportionately increased. These figures seem very large when compared with the statistics of earlier years. In 1853 water was sup- plied to 4,283 families, there were 614 miles of pipes, and during that year there were 303,531,743 gallons pumped. By ISSO, there were 33,904 families using water, 10,576,571,254 gallons were pumped and there were 301 miles of piping. The meter rate of water to the consumer is $1 for the first 1,000 cubic feet per quarter, 50 cents per 1,000 for the next 3,000, and 35 cents per 1,000 for all additional.
The first expenditure for the present water works site was $35,000, paid for
WATER WORKS PARK
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the land, which sum seems insignificant when one considers that the total value of the whole system is approximately $18,000,000. The value of the land, buildings and pumping plant is placed at $2,649,600.
In the operation of the Detroit system of water supply, the city has been divided into low and high pressure districts. The low pressure district embraces all territory below a contour line approximately forty feet above the level of the Detroit River, and the high pressure distriet everything between the forty and the sixty foot contours. The pressures maintained at the pumping stations average forty-seven pounds for the low service and sixty-five pounds for the high service, resulting in an average pressure of about thirty pounds at the ultimate points of distribution at normal stages.
The water supply is taken in at an intake crib in the Detroit River near the upper end of Belle Isle, 3,200 feet southeastwardly from water works park, and flows thence through a 10-foot diameter brick tunnel to the shore shaft, whence it is distributed either into the settling basin, or through the by-pass conduits into the various conduits leading to the water galleries of the pumping stations. At the shore shaft the water is treated with chlorine gas as a disinfectant, in proportions of from 112 to 21/2 pounds of liquid chlorine to a million gallons of water, or in the ratio of 0.2 to 0.3 part of chlorine to 1,000,000 parts of water. The result of the disinfecting treatment has been the reduction of bacteria from an average of 187 per cubie centimeter in the river water to 14 in the treated effluent, and a reduction of 86% in B. Coli. After the chlorine treatment, the water flows normally through the so-called settling basin to the several conduits, and through four screen-houses with wire sereens of 1/2-inch mesh, and thence to the water galleries and suction pipes of the pumps. Thenee the water is forced by the pumps through four 48-inch and five 42-inch mains into all the branches of the distribution system.
During the year 1919, plans were matured for the installation of a complete filtration system, and a bond issue of $12,000,000 to cover its cost was submitted to the people at an elcetion in August, 1920, and carried. The question of filtra- tion is one of the principal municipal subjects now before the people of Detroit and it is not amiss in this connection to publish an authoritative article upon this topic. Detroit will eventually have one of the best and most complete filtra- tion plants in the world and it is of interest to Detroiters to know the history of the filtration idea, as well as the local conditions and the Detroit plant.
FILTRATION AND THE DETROIT FILTER PLANT BY THEODORE A. LEISEN
The purification of public water supplies has become a subject of paramount importance in the minds of sanitarians and others interested in municipal wel- fare because of the rapidly increasing tendency towards concentration of urban population and manufacturing industries, with the consequent increase in pollu- tion of the water ways which necessarily serve as the source of water supplies for most communities.
While the desirability of a pure and wholesome supply of water for domestic consumption always has been recognized theoretically, yet practical efforts to obtain it had not been conspicuously evident in many of the growing municipali- ties of this country until the latter part of the Nineteenth Century.
Cities bordering on the Great Lakes were particularly fortunate in having had a provisional solution for their water problems in the past, as by frequent
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extensions of their intake pipes or tunnels they have managed to preserve a reasonably unpolluted water supply, but less favorably situated eastern and interior cities, dependent solely for their supply upon the waters of rivers on which they border,-rivers foully contaminated with the sewage and industrial wastes of towns located farther up the streams, and in some cases even by their own sewage-had recourse only to storage and sedimentation as a partial and in- adequate remedy for minimizing the polluted condition of the water until filtration was presented as a panacea for this particular evil.
It was astounding to see with what apparent equanimity and even apathy the inhabitants viewed this growing menace to the health of the communities, and even more surprising to note the opposition which the earlier advocates of filtration of public water supplies encountered from the laymen as well as from the medical fraternity, and it was only by a protracted compaign of education that some communities were finally convinced of the benefits and efficacy of filtration as a practical sanitary and aesthetic solution of their water supply troubles.
DEVELOPMENT OF FILTRATION
Before taking up the description of the Detroit filtration plant it may be of interest to touch briefly on the early development of filters for municipal water supplies and furnish some data showing the sanitary results attained by the adoption of water purification works:
Eliminating any special reference to the earlier sporadic attempts at methods and processes designed to clarify water, it may be stated that filtration as ap- plied to publie water supplies apparently had its incipience in 1829 at East Chelsea, London, England, when upon recommendation of the Royal Com- mission on the Metropolitan Water Supply, the Chelsea Water Company con- structed and placed in operation the first filter plant of which there is authentic record. In 1849 England suffered from a cholera epidemic, and the theory was then first advanced that cholera was a water-borne disease, and the epidemic directly traceable to polluted water. A few years later an act of Parliament compelled the London Metropolitan District to filter its entire water supply, thereby stamping the system with official approval.
Development of water filtration both in England and on the Continent was very gradual and many scientists remained skeptical of its merits as an effective means of safeguarding the public against water-borne diseases, but the severe cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892 brought such convincing proof of its efficacy that further controversion of the self-evident fact was futile. During that year Hamburg, one of the few German cities having an unfiltered water supply, lost 8,605 persons by death from cholera, while Altona and Wandsbeek, separated from Hamburg by only imaginary boundaries, but having filtered water supplies, remained comparatively free from the disease. The death rates per hundred thousand of the three sister cities during the epidemic were- Hamburg, 13,440; Altona, 2,300; and Wandsbeek, 2,200. Along one street which forms the boundary between Hamburg and Altona, cholera was rampant on the Hamburg side, whereas the Altona side was free from it, and the only difference was that Altona had a filtered water supply. Many later incidents confirmed the evidence furnished by the Hamburg case, but none was more con- vincing.
The earliest serious effort towards investigating the subject of filtration of
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public water supplies with a view to its adoption in this country was made in 1866 when Mr. James C. Kirkwood was commissioned by the City of St. Louis to make a study of European filters, and report on the desirability of the application of the principle to the Mississippi River water. His report published in 1869 was the first important treatise on the subject issued in the United States. For- tunately his recommendations were not accepted, as the water at St. Louis could not have been successfully treated by the type of filter then in use in Europe,-the slow sand filter. It is interesting to note that fifty years elapsed be- fore St. Louis actually installed its filter plant, although for several years its water supply was greatly improved by coagulation and sedimentation.
CLASSIFICATION OF FILTERS
Broadly speaking, filters are divided into two classes :- slow sand and mechanical or rapid sand filters, the latter type being a development of this country, and the solution of the treatment of our highly turbid waters, which the older slow sand type never could have handled successfully.
The slow sand type, as the name implies, is operated at a very slow rate, averaging less than four million gallons per acre per day. The rapid sand filters are commonly operated at a rate of from one hundred to one hundred and twenty- five million gallons per acre, and later experiments have shown that with some waters this can be increased to one hundred and eighty million gallons per acre. Both types use sand as a filtering medium, but the typifying characteristics of the rapid sand filter are first :- the preparatory treatment of the water before it reaches the sand bed, and second: the method of washing the filters. In the slow sand filters the water is conveyed to the sand beds without any previous treatment except such as may be afforded by plain subsidence, where storage reservoirs exist. With the rapid sand method a coagulating medium, usually aluminum sulphate or sulphate of iron is employed to assist and hasten sedi- mentation, mixing chambers and coagulation basins being integral parts of the filter plant. The coagulant which is introduced into the water before it reaches the mixing chamber is immediately decomposed by combination with the alkaline constituents usually present in the water (or artificially supplied when lacking) forming a gelatinous precipitate known as aluminum hydrate or hydroxide of iron, according to the coagulating medium used, which has a tendency to unite the minute particles of suspended matter into masses or "floo" and coinci- dentally, enmeshing the bacteria. These combined masses of matter are quickly precipitated in the passage of the water through the coagulation basins where it flows under reduced velocity, the percentage or reduction in these basins being determined by the length of the period of subsidence allowed. On an average probably fifty percent settles out in the coagulation basins, and the residue is deposited on the upper surface of the filter beds as the water filters through the sand. The combined action of coagulation and filtering usually removed prac- tically one hundred percent of the turbidity, and about ninety-nine percent of the bacteria.
All filter beds become clogged after passing a given quantity of water, the total quantity passed being governed by the condition of the raw water. Usually a filter will pass from fifty to two hundred million gallons per acre before the clogging creates a prohibitive loss of head. Slow sand filters are cleaned by scraping off a thin upper layer of the sand which has become impregnated with an accumulation of sediment. Rapid sand filters are washed by reversing the
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flow of filtered water, which, bubbling up from the bottom, holds the finer sand practically in suspension, washing off the adhering coagulum and mud, which overflows into the wash water troughs, and is conveyed thence to the sewer.
The relative merits of slow sand and rapid sand filters was a subject of ardent controversial discussion among sanitarians during the earlier stages of filter development, but in the last ten years the rapid sand type has forged to the front, and today over seventy-five per cent of the filtered water delivered to American municipalities is furnished through the medium of rapid sand filters. The plans for the Detroit plant provide for the rapid type.
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