IV. City - Built It In Order To Destroy Family
IV. City
To some extent, it is comforting to know that London and Paris had dysfunctional sewage systems, but Engineer knew that the current situation of his city is probably much worse than 19th century London and Paris.
Once the river reaches the city, it turns into filth; it is already contaminated before it reaches the city, but the entrance to it becomes the beginning of the completion of contamination. The polluted river stretches a great distance even after it exits there; the marine life is scarcely sustainable. All types of garbage and rubbish cover its banks completely; there is not much difference between that and a local sanitation center. The sanitation center might be a more encouraging site since garbage gets processed periodically. Half of the city’s raw sewage, that is completely black and toxic, flows into its water directly. Article published on the website of a major international news organization reports the following; when the regional director of the Campaign to Protect the Environment, an international environmental organization answered to the reporter, he commented, “The river is dead. It just has not been officially cremated.” The comment was not sarcasm; he told what he and everyone else saw.
The perniciousness of the river shows that the society has not fundamentally progressed to the next level while its economic growth is hailed by the media; it shows that the shape of the dog-eat-dog society has just changed its form. The government has spent nearly $500 million trying to clean up the river, most of it going to waste-treatment stations, yet pollution levels more than doubled for the last ten years. And they continue to rise.
The problem is that 11 of the city’s 17 sewage-treatment plants are underutilized; a quarter of them run at less than 30 percent capacity. Why this disaster? The city’s sewage system is so corroded and clogged that it cannot deliver to the treatment plants the waste of the 55 percent of the city’s 15 million inhabitants who are connected to the system. Even if the plants were fully utilized, there would still be the waste from 1,500 unplanned neighborhoods, where sewage finds its way into the drains and the river.
According to the Campaign to Protect the Environment, nearly 80 percent of the river’s pollution is the result of raw sewage. Combined with industrial runoff, which comes to more than three billion liters of waste per day, a quantity well beyond the river’s assimilative capacity. The fizzing mix is so glaring that it can be viewed by a mediocre quality satellite image.
