4

Growing Old Thanks to Water Treatment

第四章

延年益寿得力于水处理

During the nineteenth century, the United States matured from asleepy, isolated country to a leading industrialized nation. New York grew froma city of fewer than 70,000,000 to a metropolis of over 3 million people. Chicago went from being a tiny military outpost to a city of 1.7 million people. And just as their European counterparts had decades earlier, cities throughout the United States suffered from cholera outbreaks, filthy streets,and inadequate water supplies during the first half of the nineteenth century.¹ In response, American cities made major investments in Water 1.0. During thelast decades of the century, New York built the first sections of an aqueduct that would ultimately bring water into the city from a pristine watershed 190 km (120 miles) to the northwest. The city also built a network of underground tunnels to convey its sewage to the ocean.

１９世纪时，美国已经从一个缺乏活力的孤立国发展为一个工业化的领军国。纽约从一个人口不足７万的小城市，发展为人口超过３００万的大都市。芝加哥也从一个小小的军事前哨，变成拥有１７０万人口的大城市。１９世纪的前五十年，美国许多城市也遭遇了霍乱暴发、街道肮脏和供水问题，就像几十年前的欧洲城市一样^［１］。为应对这些棘手的问题，美国政府对“水１．０”做了重大投资。在１９世纪最后的几十年间，纽约完成了一条大渡槽的第一期工程，这个渡槽最终可以将城市西北方１９０公里处的纯净水引到市内。纽约还修建了地下隧道网络，将污水排入海里。

Chicago was thinking big, too. There was plenty of water in Lake Michigan, but as the city expanded, water from the sewage-contaminated Chicago River kept getting sucked into the city’s drinking water intake pipes along the shore of the lake. After the city’s engineers extended the water intake pipesas far from the shoreline as they possibly could, they embarked on a more radical solution: they raised the elevation of the entire downtown and reversed the flow of the city’s main river. The canals and locks of the Sanitary and Ship Canal were completed in 1892. Thereafter, the city’s wastes flowed to the Mississippi River and not into Chicago’s Lake Michigan drinking water intakes.²

与此同时，芝加哥也在进行大胆的探索。密歇根湖拥有丰富的水资源，但是随着城市扩建，受到城市生活污水污染的芝加哥河的河水，不断进入沿着密歇根湖岸布设的饮用水进水管道。在芝加哥的工程师们将进水管道延伸至距离密歇根湖岸线尽可能远的地方之后，他们又开始着手一个更激进的方案：抬高整个市中心区的（河床）海拔，使芝加哥河水倒流。到１８９２年，芝加哥环境卫生和航行运河的水道和船闸已全部建成。此后，芝加哥的废水流向了密西西比河，不再污染密歇根湖的饮用水进水口^［２］。

Although much of America’s growth tookplace in urban neighborhoods, like those that housed the sweatshops of New York’s garment district and the stockyards of Chicago, manufacturing was also booming in small cities scattered throughout the northeastern states and the industrializing Midwest. Pittsburgh made steel. Minneapolis milled flour. And Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit made machinery. It is in one of these smallcities that we pick up the next phase of the urban water story.

尽管当时美国的经济增长大部分发生在城市里，比如那些坐落在纽约服装区的血汗工厂和芝加哥的畜禽养殖场，但是在东北部和工业化的中西部，那些零散的小城市的制造业也蓬勃发展。匹兹堡生产钢铁。明尼阿波利斯生产面粉。克利夫兰、辛辛那提以及底特律都在制造机械设备。我们就在这些小城市中选取一个例子，接着讲有关城市水的故事。

(Last paragraph of Chapter 4)

The combination of water filtration and chlorination was the first major innovation in drinking water since the Roman aqueducts and sewers. The newly developed system of drinking water treatment—which we’ll refer to as Water 2.0—made it possible for growing cities to obtain water from sources that would otherwise be unsafe to drink. Immense progress had been made between1890—when Lawrence, Massachusetts, first had sought Professor Sedgwick’s helpin fighting typhoid—and the 1940s, when filtration and chlorination became the norm for treating surface waters destined for water utility customers. Through these efforts, waterborne diseases like typhoid fever and cholera were largely eliminated in the United States. Consistent with Hazen’s Theorem, substantial decreases in death rates were evident wherever water treatment plants had been built. In fact, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering identified watertreatment and distribution as the fourth most important engineering feat of thetwentieth century, after electrification, automobiles, and airplanes but aheadof electronics and the Internet.⁴³ Filtration and disinfection revolutionized urban water.

水过滤技术和氯化处理相结合的方法是饮用水在古罗马发明引水渠和下水道以来的第一次大变革。使用这套饮用水处理系统的时代，我们称之为“水２．０”，它使得日益增长的城市获得安全的饮用水，否则这些水源的水是无法饮用的。水处理技术的巨大进步是在１９世纪９０年代到２０世纪４０年代之间取得的：在１８９０年，当马萨诸塞州的劳伦斯市为抗击伤寒，首先向塞奇威克教授寻求帮助开始；到１９４０年，过滤和氯化相结合的处理工艺成为水务部门为用户处理地表水的规范为止。通过这些努力，在美国基本上消除了伤寒和霍乱等水媒疾病。正如海森定理所总结的，一个地区的死亡率的大幅下降，很明显是由于在那里修建了水处理厂。实际上，美国国家工程学院认为，水处理与水分配技术是２０世纪继电气化、汽车和飞机之后的第四个最重要的工程壮举，排在电子和互联网技术之前^［４３］。过滤和消毒技术彻底改变了城市的水系统。

ps. I typed up the English myself, so errors are possible.

水４．０：饮用水的过去、现在与未来

［美］戴维·塞德拉克　著

徐向荣　等译    虞左俊　校

上海科学技术出版社

出版时间：2015.08

ISBN：978-7-5478-2729-1

定价：38元

Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Vital Resource

Paperback：March 31, 2015

by David Sedlak (Author)