It’s daunting to come up with something fresh when considering our backend beauties but the folks at NYC TV’s Secrets of New York decided they’d get the scoop on poop and hosted an exclusive screening last night of a brand new episode. The subject matter? Sewers.
Probably not the easiest topic to pitch but the ep turned out to be relatively satisfying. It was certainly reassuring to get a glimpse of a dump early on (within the first three seconds), then the ep ploughed its way through the history of the New York sewerage system and how its development fundamentally changed the course of disease in the city. Cholera, typhoid, yellow fever and more nasties were staved off with the development of the Croton Aqueduct in 1837, and since then, the city has never looked back...
So too, you’ll learn all about the ins and outs of primary sludge, methane gas, digested sludge, retention tanks, sludge boats, biosolids and how Wall-E lookalikes crawl through NY’s smaller pipes checking for cracks (no, not those ones).
It was also worth discovering that at one point the sewerage was so bad in New York Harbor it corroded ships’ hulls. But certainly the crowning glory was learning how NY’s treated dung goes down to Florida, fertilizes orchards and returns in the form of orange juice.
So reassuring that not one drop goes to waste…
