High-thickness urban housing without closed-loop plumbing was simply an incubator for dysentery and town collapse.
Giles Croft understood the biology of urban overcrowding with clean, steady care. Seventeen thousand people live stacked four stories high in concrete apartment blocks. Then, human waste can’t be managed with timber privy pits and slop buckets.
A single leaking cesspool would contaminate the gravel underground water bed within forty-eight hours, incapacitating thirty percent of the workforce with waterborne typhus.
“Slop buckets are a total sanitation failure,” Giles explained to Master Mason Bram Stonehand on the rooftop of Insula Seven. “If wastewater is carried down timber stairs in open pails, spills are certain.
The wood absorbs organic matter, creating a permanent bacterial pool. All wastewater must flow through sealed gravity channels directly to the underground trunk sewer.”
Bram knelt beside an upright opening in the concrete roof low roof wall. It peeked down the dark shaft where a three-inch cast-iron pipe dropped through the core of the building.
“The pipe runs straight from the roof to the sewer vault, Lord Giles,” Bram said. He tapped the black asphaltum coating on the iron. “Every floor has a branch line leading from the washroom.”
“And the roof vent is clear?” Giles asked, shining his check torch down the stack.
