Unsanitary and deadly: The Great Stink of 1858 may foreshadow our future climate breakdown

As Summer 2023 continues to shatter heat records, climate change experts are talking about a "new abnormal." Studies indicate that ecosystems are likely to rapidly collapse as extreme weather events caused by these heatwaves pile up, one on top of the other. Sky high temperatures are rendering cities like Phoenix, Arizona into borderline uninhabitable heat domes.

If this type of unbearable heat is going to be part of humanity's long-term future, it behooves us to turn to history for precedents. Only in that way can we better understand what awaits us.

This brings us to the Great Stink of 1858, which was an incident in English history during which the city of London was paralyzed by one of the hottest, smelliest and most unsanitary summers in history.

The story is set in London during the July and August doldrums. Because London's sewerage system had deteriorated over centuries, human waste was seeping into the banks of the Thames before it finally was dumped into the city's main river. In addition to untreated human excrement, the Thames was also full of industrial chemicals and other manufacturing byproducts. Even before the Great Stink of 1858, three separate cholera outbreaks had already been tenuously linked to the river by public health authorities. Yet there was not enough political will among the English elite to address the problem, so it simply festered — in many ways, literally.

Thousands of people died during the Great Stink, thanks largely to waterborne diseases like dysentery, typhoid and cholera while millions more were regularly forced to live in unsanitary conditions in the decades previous. The story is, at its heart, a testament to how the apathy of a society's leaders for the less fortunate can lead to unpredictable mass crises.

In another sense, the Great Stink is regarded as a tale of triumph, and in one respect that may be accurate. Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer, brilliantly convinced civic leaders to construct 132 kilometers (82 miles) of underground brick sewers that using a complex plan would divert the raw sewage away from areas where humans could interact with them.

Unlike today, when scientists know that disease is spread by microorganisms, Victorian Englishmen thought it was spread by "miasmas," or "bad air." In this sense Bazalgette's science was wrong, but his underlying reasoning was still correct: Use the potential of modern engineering to limit human contact with their own waste to the greatest extent possible. As a result of Bazalgette's ingenuity, cholera outbreaks in London were reduced and countless lives were saved.

Yet a terrible human toll had to occur to form the backdrop to that ostensibly inspiring story. This brings us to our current climate crisis. Indeed, there are already Great Stink-equivalents that are occurring today as a result of persistent heatwaves, rising sea levels and more. Likewise, climate change is driven by human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, so the systemic breakdown of our ecosystems and infrastructure represents yet another policy failure.

"While not directly related to sewage systems, there is definitely evidence that heatwaves can impact water quality and supply," Dr. Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote to Salon. "Warmer water is more hospitable to many types of waterborne diseases, and there is research around how this is and will impact drinking water supplies as well. This includes possible impacts to our seafood supply through events such as harmful algal blooms."

Herring added, "I think one of the important issues around climate change is that it puts our safe drinking water supply at risk, whether that be through contamination, water-borne diseases, coastal inundation from sea level rise causing the salinization of drinking water supplies. This is a serious issue in Florida, for example."

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"I think the lesson is that we must always be ready to adopt and adapt technology to cope with new problems, whether heatwaves, storms, drought or anything else," Stephen Halliday, author of the book "The Great Stink of London," told Salon by email. "If you look at the latest edition of 'The Great Stink,' just published, there is a postscript on the new Thames Tideway Tunnel which will deal with the sewage overflows caused by storms and concrete."

Dr. Ashok Mishra, a professor at Clemson University's Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth's Science and co-author of a landmark recent study on climate change and heatwaves, elaborated on the specific heat-related problems posed by climate change today.

"Extreme temperatures associated with heatwaves can severely impact human life and the natural ecosystem," Mishra wrote to Salon. "Unprecedented climate events like heatwaves may hamper and cause additional challenges for human systems, particularly in large settlements such as towns and cities."

When those systems break down, one gets incidents similar to the Great Stink, which caused countless Londoners to suffer from preventable diseases.

"The Great Stink resulted from unplanned and rapid population expansion in London without the provision of a proper sewerage system," Mishra pointed out. "Hence it is of utmost importance for cities and planners to account for future population changes and changes in municipal and industrial activities when designing cities and sewerage systems. Additionally, due to climate change and the rise of extreme weather events, there is an urgent need to build climate-resilient sewerage systems, allowing for the distribution of loads and providing backup in events of disruption."

He added, "Failure in sewerage management can lead to an outbreak of diseases, disruption to ecosystem balance, and intolerable odor problems."

Mishra also observed that there are specific Great Stink equivalents that have already transpired.

"Similar to the Great Stink, events of foul smell atmosphere causing discomfort to residents have been observed with the increased occurrence, especially with warmer temperatures and heatwaves causing increased bacterial enzyme activities," Mishra pointed out. "Equipment failure due to a heatwave at Crockett Wastewater Treatment Plant in September 2022 resulted in the plant malfunctioning and the whole town reeling with foul smell emanating from untreated effluents. Smaller towns, such as Osoyoos, British Columbia, relying on sewage lagoons are also facing challenges due to industrial effluents causing the failure of lagoons, while heatwaves and warmer temperatures increase the foul smell and discomfort to residents. The failure of septic tanks due to climate change is causing effluents to seep into groundwater. Marine heatwaves in coastal cities can trigger increased algal blooms, foul smells emanating from the bay, and eutrophication leading to biodiversity loss in the coastal ecosystem."