Michal Hohensee wrote:
Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Michal Hohensee wrote:
Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Petro wrote:
Ok, so let's cut that back to what we _need_. First off, we don't dump our dish water down the drain, it gets "recycled" to flush the toilets.
get them to shit outside.
Bad bad bad bad bad bad *bad* idea. This might be ok in the Russian countryside, or any other countryside, but it an *excessively* bad thing in just about any modern city. If running water fails to run in the cities, and people do as you suggest, and take their business outside, it will not be long before tremendous numbers of people get sick and die. What with the high concentrations that people live in in most cities, I expect that this'd make the Black Death look like a mild case of the flu.
Like I said, someone would need to build a latrine. That's all that's needed.
Latrines aren't sufficient to the task. In a city like NYC, latrines might solve the problem for perhaps a week (assuming that we tear up all the roads and sidewalks --something which we cannot do in time, even if we wanted to), but then they'll be full, and there won't be any more places the latrines can be rotated to.
Why, shit is actually pretty compact. usually with latrines, the liquid filtrates out, and the compressed shit does not take too much space. If you dig a deep enough hole (2-3 yards) it should last for a long, long time. I estimate that a human being produces about 1/2 to 1lb of hard waste per day, some are more full of it, some less. Let's settle on one lb per day. Let's see, a hole that is 5 yards wide, 3 yards deep, and, say, 2 yards wide, is about 30 cubic yards. It could take about 40 tons of hard compressed waste, that is, 80 thousand man-days of shitting can be compressed in it. You definitely need some heavy machinery to dig this kind of hole (and then you have to build smoe kind of frame over it to prevent people from falling into it if it collapses), but it is not hard and can even be done in a catastrophic scenario. That's a lot!!! Let's see,a high rise building with 50 floors and 10 apartments in each floor, that's about 1200 people. The latrine would last them what, about sixty days! And then they can dig another one.
Then we're back to doing it in the open. Less concentrated cities might last a while longer, but not much longer. There's no getting around it, we *need* working sewer systems to have modern cities. Otherwise, the cities die.
Not in the short run. They could survive for a while. - Igor.