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(II)-GENERAL MEASURES OF SANITATION.
(a) Sewage disposal.
An increasing number of premises in the Urban Council Area were connected up with the public sewers or acquired septic tank installations during the year under review. The Public Works Department supervised the installation of water closets in 1,470 instances in private dwellings, the figure comparing with 304 for the previous year. There still remain many houses and the vast majority of tenements and shop-houses which depend upon a bucket system for the disposal of nightsoil. Except in the case of the Peak District of Hong Kong and certain Government buildings, buckets are collected by coolies, mostly women, employed by contractors. There is no double-bucket system and the contents of house buckets are carried away in closed wooden receptacles during the hours of darkness, through the streets to a fleet of junks berthed along the water front. During 1937 there were seven stations on the Island of Hong Kong and five in Kowloon on the mainland.
The junks in question form part of the conservancy system owned by the Urban Council. When they have collected their quota of nightsoil in the steel-lined compartments of their holds, the junks are taken by sea to Gin Drinkers Bay. Here nightsoil is baled out by men standing shoulder deep in excreta into other junks owned by contractors. In normal times the nightsoil is carried up the Canton River by the second fleet of junks and sold chiefly for the fertilization of the mulberry trees on which the silkworms feed.
Since the decline in the industry and particularly since Sino-Japanese hostilities made coastal shipping rather a precarious trade, there has been a tendency for the contractors owning the second fleet of junks to dispose of nightsoil to market gardeners and for fish ponds in the New Territories. This obviously constitutes a grave source of danger when it is remembered that typhoid and dysentery are common in Hong Kong and that outbreaks of cholera are also not of infrequent occurrence. Although a certain amount of revenue accrues from the sale of nightsoil to contractors in the way described, there is always a danger of the junks being unable to function owing to strikes in labour or to typhoons. The service was, in fact, seriously disorganised during the typhoon season 1937. For this reason, steps are being taken to investigate the possibility of drastically altering the system and to arrange for nightsoil to be dumped at stated places—usually public latrines from which it will be carried away in sewers to the deep sea either direct when no danger to public health can be assured or after partial purification by the activated sludge process with the effluent passing over aeration beds.
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