422 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
A large gas leakage is inconsistent with good pavements. If repairs are neg- lected, leakage quickly attains intolerable proportions. If necessary repairs are attended to, the streets are quickly scarred with patches. In the case of asphalt, the destruction due to gas leakage is rapid and complete. The binder of the asphalt is attacked by the olefiants and decomposed. The solution for this anxious municipal problem would appear to be in pipe galleries.
The fire hazard of gas leakage is incapable of exaggeration. It is enormously increased by the fact that gas which has passed even for a short distance through soil is thereby rendered nearly or quite odorless. A very large proportion of the unex- plained fires in cities is due to gas. The inspectors of the Bureau of Buildings of New York lately began to look for gas in the air of theaters, music halls, and other places of public assembly, and rarely fail to find it in proportions ranging from 0.2 or 0.3 per cent, to 5 per cent. This is in summer, with all the ventilation possible.
The hygienic aspects are scarcely less serious. In the city under consideration the leakage carries between 35 and 40 per cent, of carbon monoxide, which is probably the most insidious blood poison known. Experiments upon animals warrant the belief that air containing anything more than 0.4 per cent, is capable of causing death in man, though anything over 0.2 per cent, would in many cases prove fatal. It has no smell or irritating properties. Oxygen absorbed by the lungs is normally taken up by the red matter of the blood, hemoglobin. Hemoglobin has affinity for oxygen, but it has enormously greater affinity for carbon monoxide about 400 times greater. Hence, when the hemoglobin is saturated with carbon monoxide, oxygen can no longer be carried from the lungs to the tissues, and death ensues.
J. J. Concannon, M.D., of New York, who has very carefully studied gas poison- ing, says : Few seem aware that carbon monoxide exerts its deleterious effect, be the quantity present ever so small. The principal cause of the anaemia and lowered vitality which sooner or later appears in all city workers is the illuminating gas with which the city atmosphere is heavily charged through leakage. When inhaled in large quantity, carbon monoxide causes a profound anaemia, often fatal. When the air contains but a small percentage, a less pronounced anaemia gradually but surely appears. Doubtless this will be recognized eventually as the cause of the readiness with which the city dweller contracts grippe, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and many other diseases. Chemical and microscopic examinations usually show the effect of prolonged city life upon the red blood cells.
Most of the evils attributed to "sewer gas" are due to carbon monoxide, which is not a product of organic decomposition in sewers, and which is there only because gas which leaks from mains into the soil tends to accumulate in just such pockets as the sewers offer. During April and May some very interesting experiments were con- ducted by the Committee on Hygiene of the New York County Medical Association. These pointed very clearly to the agency of unsuspected gas in causing types of per- sistent general malaise. When gas was found the patients were promptly removed to a different environment, with immediate recovery, only to relapse when temporarily returned. In each instance the access of gas was from the sewer, through the house drain, and its escape was from defects in the plumbing.
What is the remedy ? If a remedy is not found, the time is not far distant when the gas industry will have to be suppressed as a public nuisance, dangerous to life and detrimental to health. Concealment of the truth is not a step in the direction of a solution of the problem. Let us know what we are dealing with, at least. To this end I advise an effort to secure the enactment of laws requiring gas companies to make their statistics public. Where leakage is found to be excessive, or where for any reason it entails or threatens danger to life or property, it should be the duty of the state board of health to investigate the causes and to take such steps to abate the nuisance as its powers may permit or the public interest demand. (The writer submits the form of a bill designed to meet the evil.) JAMES C. BALES, M.E., PH.D., " Gas Leakage in American Cities," in Municipal Journal and Engineer, September, 1902.
R. M.
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