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Sanitation

Sanitation

Prerequisites

Requires:

• Germ Theory
• Industrial Revolution

Statistics

Gives:

• Sewer System

Gameplay

As Factories bring people into the cities to work, Pollution, and Overcrowding of Cities become a major problem. Building Sewer Systems in every major Production center will help control the problem.

Historical

The first artificial system for bringing water into a city was a 30-mile long aqueduct built by the Assyrians to supply Nineveh around 700 BC. The Romans, beginning in 312 BC, pioneered public water supply for city-dwellers using aqueducts, reservoirs, and public fountains or wells. Except for settling tanks to take the worst solid waste out of the water, no one paid much attention to actually cleaning or purifying the water provided, and the result was an almost continuous history of water-borne diseases and plaques throughout urban history. Cholera, a water-borne disease, killed thousands of people each year in virtually every city in Europe and the United States throughout the first half of the 19th century. Finally, in 1853 John Snow, a London doctor, traced a cholera outbreak to a public water pump whose water was contaminated from a cesspool. As the new theory of germ-causation for disease gained ground and water-borne microorganisms were identified, cities rushed to provide purified water and to properly dispose of potentially contaminating waste. By the beginning of the twentieth century, at least in Western Europe and North America, the filtering or treating of public water supplies with antibacterial chemicals was considered standard practice, and the incidence of disease and especially of infant mortality dropped precipitously.