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By Filip Mazurczak
Warsaw’s sewer system, one of the first in Europe, began operating 140 years ago. Built by British engineers, the sewers survived the destruction of World War Two, when they were used by underground resistance fighters to move around the city, and continue to serve Varsovians today.
By the end of World War II, Warsaw was a smouldering skeleton of a city , with 85% of its buildings ruined and most of its population killed or expelled by the Nazi-German occupiers.
One of the few parts of Warsaw’s infrastructure that remained relatively intact, however, was its extensive sewerage system, which had played a crucial role in both the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and 1944 Warsaw Uprising, enabling partisans to move quickly through the bowels of the city.
The Polish capital owed this underground labyrinth to the noted British engineer William Lindley and his sons, who had been commissioned in the 1880s by an enlightened mayor to take action to counteract a catastrophic sanitary situation that was causing thousands of deaths every year.
When the network began operating 140 years ago, Warsaw became one of the first European cities with a modern sewage system, and many parts of it continue to be used to this day.
“The air is thick…filth is growing”
In the late 18th century, Poland was erased from the map of Europe in a series of partitions that divided it up between Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Whereas the Austrian rulers were relatively tolerant, and even appointed numerous Poles to high-ranking administrative posts, the Polish population experienced brutal forced Germanisation and Russification in the remaining partitions.
In Warsaw, in the Russian partition, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation led to an increase in the population from 163,000 to 383,000 between 1850 and 1882. But it also led to a growth in untreated waste.
The celebrated Polish novelist Bolesław Prus wrote in his weekly column for Kurier Warszawski : “The air is thick, the cobblestones are rising, filth is growing, and people are growing weaker…The human race is on its way to the cemetery.”
The pervasive unpleasant smell was, however, less of a danger for Varsovians than the deleterious health effects resulting from the fact that they drank unfiltered water from the Vistula River.
In the 19th century alone, the city experienced five cholera epidemics as well as major outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid fever and typhus, among others. Human waste left Warsaw homes for the Vistula, often infecting wells along the way.
Warsaw’s mayor from 1875 to 1892 was Sokrat Starynkevich, an enlightened and modernising Russian general. He regularly consulted his decisions on the construction of the sewage and water system in Warsaw with the Citizens’ Sanitary Committee, which alerted him to the appalling state of the city’s water.
The construction of Warsaw’s slow sand filters, 1880s ( Wikimedia Commons , under public domain)
The mayor was informed that, between 1874 and 1879, the death rate in Warsaw was 41.5 for every thousand inhabitants. Meanwhile, according to data provided by the academic and activist Adolf Suligowski, for each of the city’s inhabitants, 462 kilograms of human excrement were dumped into the Vistula annually.
Warsaw also had a significant Russian military presence, especially since crushing the 1863 Polish January Insurrection, so it was in the Russians’ interest for drinking water to be clean and safe.
An engineer whose vision changed Warsaw
In 1876, just a year after coming to power, Starynkevich appointed the English civil engineer William Lindley to design Warsaw’s sewer and water supply system, approving his blueprint four years later.
This London native had experience in Germany, building the Hamburg-Bergedorf railway and overseeing the reconstruction of Hamburg, which had been badly damaged in a major 1842 fire.
Lindley’s plan for the northern German city included the building of an 11-kilometre sewer system. He was influenced by the social reformer Henry Chadwick, who had demonstrated the connection between sewage disposal, clean water, and the spread of disease.
The choice of Lindley, a foreigner, to lead these modernisation efforts was not well-received by Warsaw’s local engineers, who competed with him for a lucrative contract with the city authorities. But Starynkevich was adamant that Lindley was the right choice for Warsaw, having visited his works in Hamburg and Frankfurt with a group of local engineers.
For almost half a century, Ryszard Żelichowski, a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences, has been passionate about the impact of Lindley and his eldest son, William Heerlein Lindley, who oversa…
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