The water-supply of Bombay : being a report submitted to the Bench of Justices of that city / by their Executive Engineer Hector Tulloch.

  • Tulloch, Hector.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water-supply of Bombay : being a report submitted to the Bench of Justices of that city / by their Executive Engineer Hector Tulloch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    good for them, and that they were not to spill more in the act of drinking than they could possibly help. The people were to he allowed to carry away as much as they chose, but, having got it into their houses, they were to take great care of it. The Government of those days must have had wonderful faith in human nature, if they supposed that a man, having taken the trouble to convey a certain quantity of water to his house, would be influenced in his use of it away from the surveillance of the outer world and by a proclamation ! However, this advice to the patient not to drink more Captain Turner's than was good for him, while all the time he 1846. was dying of thirst, was of no use. In spite of the Proclamation, he still cried out for water, and the autho- rities seem to have considered the cry not an unreasonable one, for, on the 21st March 1846, the Civil Architect of the Presidency, Captain T. M. B. Turner, of the Engineers, acting under the instructions of the Chief Engineer, submitted a new project. This was to intercept the rain falling—1st, on a por- tion of that side of Malabar Hill which faces Back Bay ; 2nd, on the hill near that on which the Parsee Tower of Silence stands; and 3rd, on some ground lying directly north of the Gwalia Tank.'* Having intercepted the rain, Captain Turner proposed to lead it into a reservoir 400 feet square to be built close to the Gwalia Tank. The total supply calculated to be obtained from this project, which was probably intended for only a portion of the town, was 2.9,000,000 gallons, or, as Captain Turner put it, sufficient at the rate of five gallons a day for 62,222 people during 90 days. But this proved of no use. The attraction of five gallons per head per diem was not enough to reconcile the patient to a sudden death after three months. In fact, the prospect of a short, life and a merry one did not suit him at all, for he cried out louder than ever, and so the crisis continued.