Drinking Water In Prisons

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The young, twelve year old boy sat at the table while tying the string around the jars filled with blacking. The boy took a break. He knew that when he came home, he would basically come home to nothing. No family, no education or love. He was lonely and poor. He could not come home and have a snack to hold him over for dinner but that is if he even had dinner that night. His earnings from work were barely enough for pay for a meal. He continued to work and pasted a label on the jar. He looked around at the factory he worked in. The floors were rotted and the cellars were full of rats. Then the worst idea came to mind. The factory was on the banks of the Thames River. That meant that waste could just be dumped into their drinking water. The…show more content…
"Surface water from roads and roofs" got washed into the sewers when it rained and it was not filtered (Brimblecombe 1). "Any dirt or oil on the roads [got] washed straight into the river system" (Brimblecombe 1). Some toilets were set up incorrectly. People set them up to the "drainage system" and the waste went into the river. (Brimblecombe 1) The river was contaminated and no one did anything to fix it. It was unhealthy for the people to drink but they had no choice because there was no other water for them to drink. The river that they got their water from was polluted and they risked their life every time they drank from it. Pollution that was occurring in the Victorian Era is still in existence…show more content…
Some doctors even said that cholera was gotten from the disgusting smell itself. People could very rarely get fresh water in this time period. There was little or no clean drinking water supply. There was a pump that came out from the Thames River but it did not filter it because the water was brown and foul tasting. A lot of the times the water was “thick and muddy” (Mcalpine 2). “Even if you could access fresh water, it would be left in old, rotting, wooden barrels with flaky paint, and the dregs would not be washed out before the new water was sluiced” (Mcalpiner
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