THE H.B. TRIBUNE. WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 1911. AUCKLAND’S IMPURITIES.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 176, 12 July 1911, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE. WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 1911. AUCKLAND’S IMPURITIES.

The report of Auckland s Chief Sanitary Inspector, delivered to the Borough Council at its recent meeting, is not only calculated to make one shudder with disgust, but to wondei what can be the use of lectures on sanitation, and high payments to salaried officials, while such a death-crop of impure conditions exists in the very heart of the city. The outcry against the plague rodent is not worth raising compared to the necessity for cleaning some of the human abodes, which reek with pestilent germs. For instance, take one dining-room in Queen street, kept open for public supply of cooked food. On a recent Sunday evening the Inspector found two men on the basement floor of these premises engaged in opening oysters, the whole place smelling most offensively of decaying vegetables, and rubbish stored therein. There were seven dead rats on the floor, and one in an open box of currants. The place had literally been swarming with rats, and no efforts had been made to remove them. -All food was open and accessible to the vermin. In this basement live poultry, vegetables, groceries, meat, coal and lumber were accumulated for the cooking process. In addition to this disgusting condition of things, the inspector found the kitchen utensils and sanitary appliances coated with grease and dirt. Again in Queen street he inspected a bakehouse where the oven top was used to deposit quantities of old rubbish, including bags, tins, bottles, egg-shells, worn-out boots, decayed potatoes and the like. Cupboards where cooked food was put to cool were lined with cobwebs and dust, alive with vermin and everywhere evidence of the presence of rats, for the floor was rotten and broken by them. At one of the hotels the kitchen was situated in a dirty basement ,the only light and ventilation obtainable through the street grating, and the lift used for taking up the cooked food to the dining-room was the same, one as used for carrying up tins of garbage and decomposed scraps and bones. Needless to say rats had a good time there also. Considering these dreadful conditions have been discovered, it is no wonder the ( ity fathers are bestirring themselves to eradicate, them. The deplorable part of it all lies in the fact that at this enlightened age people should be found ignorant enough to exist in such disgustingly insanitary conditions. We hear so much nowaday about health and sanitation from the press and the public platform that the Auckland disclosures come with a species of tfinnl-c To C i

snows very clearly that there is a section of the people who can never be touched by health-talk and sanitary teachings and for the benefit of the wholesome part of the community, they must be stirred up, and forced into unwelcome cleanliness. It is nauseous enough, in good truth, to hear of Chinese gardeners washing vegetables in a creek affected by sewage as was reported in the press only yesterday, hut bred and born as they have been in uncivilised conditions, one forgives if one '•annot forget, but there is no excuse whatever for our own people to vie with them in filthy habits of bio. It is rather ludicrous to think ° L he J < ’? ty Fathers Paying so much a head for rats, when such splendid hunting grounds are available. J hey had better now go j n f or wholesale destruction of the rat colonies, and the redemption of the rat-breeders.