MODEL EXAMPLE

Timaru Herald, Volume CLIII, Issue 22478, 13 January 1943, Page 4

MODEL EXAMPLE

Art Of Adaptation Hygiene and Sanitation Prom the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. An Advanced Pacific Base, December 16. Determined to make the best of unattractive surroundings and difficult living conditions, a Royal New Zealand Air Force unit operating out of this Pacific base is by sheer hard work and ingenuity turning its station into a model example of adaptation to isolated, semi-tropic island life. With its own piped water supply, electrically-lit messing, administration and recreation buildings, hot showers, gravel pathways and even vegetable gardens, the camp is the best I have seen for hundreds of miles. It is probably the healthiest, too, for such successful emphasis has been placed on sanitation that to-day there is not a sick man in the camp. The comfortable station hospital lies empty. A recital of the features of the camp, however, is misleading. Quarters at a permanent station in New Zealand are luxurious by comparison, and not one of the facilities here is to be taken for granted. Water supply, for instance, is no simple question of connecting up with a main; it is a matter of endless care in maintaining a source of supply and in purifying and distributing it. But It is by local standards that the station may be judged excellent, and it is hard work and enthusiasm that have made it excellent. Bivouac Camp After spending a few months in a bivouac camp, the unit chose for its more permanent home an area of light bush alongside a stream. With prefabricated materials, a construction unit put up the buildings, and the airmen have added tents with wooden floors, roads, tracks and clearings. Water is pumped from the stream into reservoir tanks, and from there it flows through a network of pipes to the cookhouse, hot and cold showers and laundry. Consumption has to be carefully controlled, since in dry weather the stream may stop running altogether. It was a mere series of motionless pools when I saw it, and the natural swimming hole was an un-pleasant-looking, oily green. But there are alternative sources of supply, and the swimming pool still serves a useful purpose as the reservoir for an ingenious fire-fighting system, in which by means of a booster pump and valves the water can be sent to the hydrants through the ordinary supply pipes. Sanitation is almost a fetish here, and the results justify it. Water for drinking is thoroughly treated. Drainage, one of the biggest problems, has been tackled with remarkable success by the use of deep soakage pits. Food scraps are drained in wire baskets, stored in fly-proofed tins and disposed of as pig feed. Empty tins are burnt clean and buried in the soakage pits. There are easily-cleaned and drained concrete floorings in the cookhouse and showers. One of the most important results of all these precautions is that flies have been kept down to an absolute minimum. Mosquitoes are fought in their breeding places by a medical officer who is loaned part-time by an army unit. Personal hygiene is insisted up with similarly successful results. For example, as the men go to their meals along a concrete pathway they stop to dip their plates and utensils in hot, antiseptic water and wash their hands in a mild disinfectant. After eating, they wash the dishes in a tub of boiling water and rinse them In another. Dysentery and similar complaints have consequently disappeared from the camp. Another menace in these areas, the Infection known as “athlete’s foot,” is being combated by regular foot inspections and early treatment. Daily showers are an indispensable aid against outbreaks of sores caused apparently by the infection of cuts.