The first payment was £2.5million, agreed in 1858.
The official opening was in 1865, although some sections were not really finished until 1875

82 miles of brick built  main sewers, fed by over 1000miles of piped drains.

Approx estimates of 318 million bricks and 670,000 cubic metres of concrete.

Construction costs ran higher than plan and in July 1863 an additional £1.2 million was needed. Further costs again between 1865 and 1875.

Wikipedia reckons final cost was approximately £6.5 million...

I suspect we'd not get started anything like so fast, due to scoping studies, planing committees arguments, then risk assesments and so on. But a large overspend would be more familiar territory....

By predating the planning acts by 80 years, the HSE by more than 100, the project was able to run very fast by modern standards, and employ so many navvies and brick layers that there was a noticable uptick in builders' wages and social status. Mind you we are not losing 6000 folk in a single cholera outbreak and thinking it normal either... If we were maybe we'd be quicker.

It is still working now due to what might today be seen as an  'overdesign' in the daimeters of main sewers (the emabankements were built specially to cover them over after all and made the river narrower and much more square sided) and the use of the modern portland cement, combined with the then revolutionary practice of testing cement samples, and rejecting any batches that failed.

Comparing it to one of todays big tunnel projects it was expensive for what it is, and construction would be more mechanised, but the Victorians  did the best with what they had and had a very 'can do' attitude, often missing today.

M

I guess the obvious modern example is Crossrail / Elizabeth Line, which had all the same delays and cost overruns as the big Victorian engineering projects, and where (in answer to the initial post) I suspect yes, the civils works will still be there and operable in 150 years time.

However, re some of Mike's points, I can't find anywhere (on a quick Google), how many people died building the Bazalgette sewers, but knowing how many workers were usually killed or seriously injured on big Victorian (and later) construction projects I would have though it was going to be considerably more (whether proportional to the workforce, or absolute) than building Crossrail. Maybe someone knows? For Crossrail it was:

There have been four fatal collisions involving HGVs or lorries working for sub-contractors on the Crossrail project – 3 x fatal collisions involving cyclists and 1 x fatal collision involving a pedestrian.

There has been one construction fatality on the Crossrail project.

This of course is our choice as a society, we can do risk assessments and act on them, or we can kill people. Sorry to be blunt, but I've yet to see anyone propose a workable alternative. But it is a choice, and different societies do make it differently. When the average life expectancy is 41 (as it was in 1865) one choice may seem appropriate (better to risk dying but being able to put food on the table for the time being). Today with an average life expectancy of around 80 - precisely of course because of work such as Bazalgette's - a different choice may seem appropriate, even if it is more expensive.

(That said I can rant at great length about badly conducted risk assessments which give unnecessary delays and pointless token measures without actually reducing risks, which gives 'elf and safety' a bad name, but that's my day job to try to get people to do them sensibly, proportionately and at the right time! So I won't rant here about it.)

Re the "can-do" attitude, personally I'm not convinced this has changed, plenty of worthwhile Victorian projects didn't happen because they weren't going to make someone lots of money, and on the flip side the development of the Covid Vaccines is a fantastic example that shows that we can respond to a crisis (without cutting corners) just as much as those involved with the 19th century sewerage problems did. What may have changed is that current challenges in UK society at least may be less likely to need big infrastructure projects to solve them, so the "can do" appears in different ways? But in either era it seems that if there's either lots of money to be made, or an absolutely desperate crisis then things happen.

Cheers,

Andy

we can do risk assessments and act on them, or we can kill people.

As one firmly on the regulatory liberal side of the fence, I only partly agree with that.

I would never advocate a return to the lethality of the Victorian workplace, as those workers really could not be sure of going home in the evening in one piece or not, and had not  way to control that.  However from an informed postition, some situations require measure of abilty to assses risks as you go  along which the modern approach stifles.
Consider driving - after a fashion a risk assesment as you look out the windows and move your feet in response, but if you had to war-game every traffic scenario and prepare a written mthod for dealing with it and get it signed off before every car journey, we'd never get out the door.  We are of course all mortal, so as we get older and within the final 3dB of peak, then the view changes as to what is acceptable. Such cool headed, calculating  thinking gets us the protect and survive era advice that over 50s should be the first to leave the shleter and encounter  fallout, which I think is very sensible, and the perhaps more disconcerting Vulcan bomber eyepatch.

M.

mapj1 said:

some situations require measure of abilty to assses risks as you go  along which the modern approach stifles.

I think I see where you're coming from, but I'd say it depends how you go about it! I certainly feel that we should stop pretending that we ever really apply the waterfall approach ("start by identifying 100% of the hazards and work step by slow step from there"). It doesn't apply to how engineering actually happens, and, worse still, hazards get missed when projects hide the various development cycles behind trying to show the various assessment bodies what they think they "should" be showing them. Absolutely what you need to do is risk assess what you can, and keep updating it as you go. To look at it the other way, it is noticeable how many accidents or near misses arise from late engineering changes which were not re-risk assessed (or assessed for their impact on potential mitigations).

There's a major flaw in IEC61508 (or in my world EN50126) in that the lifecycle doesn't include feedback loops to allow for development cycles and emerging information - and indeed emerging engineering possibilities. The rail CSM-RA regulation has a much better diagram which shows that you do what you can at the start, and go round the loop to revise and refine your hazards and risk management as development progresses. But failing to identify at least the major hazards / risk management approaches at the start raises the significant risk of the issue coming up later of "it's too late / too expensive to sort that now" which is not a good argument at all (and likely to land them in hot water under UK law if there is an accident). 

What I find works really well is building a risk assessment culture into engineering teams, so thinking about it just becomes a "business as usual" process. I am not a fan of separate safety management teams, even though I spend too much of my time being contracted into projects to act as a safety manager or consultant. I always try to get the engineering team themselves to just think about this stuff as they go along (and of course to write it down as they go along) so as to make myself redundant!

And absolutely it's for any society to decide what an acceptable level of risk is. So we may, and do, decide either not to assess risks or not to act on risk reduction methods - the current furore over 20mph speed limits is a good example of this, ditto the arguments over lockdown. And as a more general example in the UK we are happy to kill 100 times as many people on the roads as we would accept in rail or air traffic, that's our choice. (A few years ago a couple of my colleagues presented a very interesting paper at an IET conference posing the question as to whether we should make railways more reliable, more frequent and cheaper by reducing the level of safety, therefore moving more people from road to rail, and therefore increasing the net level of safety in the country.) I remember causing great excitement in a (non-UK) project when I told them that they had a problem because they hadn't started by deciding what their tolerable fatality rate was - so they couldn't actually argue that their project was acceptably safe (because they didn't know what they were trying to achieve). One senior person in particular stated that no-one was ever going to die as a result of his project - I pointed out that this was only true if he was never going to deliver his project. I find that if we're open and honest about risks, and what level we're prepared to accept it's much easier to decide what we want to do about them. Which may be nothing.

Thanks,

Andy

Andy Millar said:

the current furore over 20mph speed limits

Double edge sword that one.

20mph less impact force and hopefully less damage to human body or lower motality figures

20mph Are satnavs updated to reflect new speed zones?  Are route planning software aware of the change?  Human time cost, takes longer to get to work or anywhere.  Will the Amazon/any delivery driver be able to complete their days work in the allocated time frame of yesterday when it was a 30mph zone?  Rephasing of traffc signals to accomodate speed change?

Is 20Mph safer?    Yes (in my opinion)

Are there massive implications?  Yes

This could pose a further discussion.  Should UK motorways have a speed increase from 70Mph to 80Mph?  Afterall everybody has heard of the German Autobahn.  They seem to have quite a safe record. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

Is 20Mph safer?    Yes (in my opinion)

Are there massive implications?  Yes

Quite. It's up to us a society to decide which we'd prefer. Mind you, strictly on that one if someone was killed by a vehicle travelling at 30mph, and if their relatives could argue that they would have survived if the vehicle had been travelling at 20mph, they could try bringing a case under HASAWA against the government (or, strictly, against whichever authority was responsible for managing the road speed) to say that the risk had not been reduced so far is is reasonably practicable, the government (or relevant body) would then have to prove that the cost of reducing the speed limit was (for all the reasons you've given) disproportionate.

That would be an interesting test case.

Afterall everybody has heard of the German Autobahn.  They seem to have quite a safe record. 

But there may be other variables - I haven't been on an autobahn for quite a few years, but when I did I noticed that the style of driving was quite different to what is commonly seen in the UK - not sure if it was just natural Teutonic "correctness", or better driver training or perhaps stricter enforcement, but things did feel rather more "systematic" over there.

   - Andy.

Only if it were the case that the  health and safety at work act would apply - it does not apply to folk who are not at work or where there is no ideintifiable employer (nor oddly does if cover  for domestic servants and similar ) . It may then protect  someone paid by the local council to staff a zebra crossing,  though probably not a parent just voluanteering,  and not most of the folk using it.  i.e. you'd need to be knocked down while at work...

In any case, the usual thing is to go after the driver not the employer.

And you have to be careful as of course 15mph is safer than 20 etc, until no-one is moving anywhere - so you have to decide what is an acceptable fatality rate - and the answer needs to be set quite high, and take into account the vehcile types. So if using a minibus takes ten cars off the road, then arguably it can be ten times more dangerous than a car, before there is no net safely benefit.

Mike.

Consider the mass of an ICE vs the mass of an EV

one hopes the brakes are scaled to match, as they are with say a lorry, so that the stopping distances remain comparable.  If  it is still moving when it hits you, even  a pedal cycle can be fatal.

Figures

Mike.

Having driven in Germany, that has 2 sides. "Ich hab' recht, Ich fahre" - "I have right of way, I'm going (and stuff the rest of you....) " also applies, so expect no sypathy if you are waiting for someone to let you in, especialy around Berlin - the general lack of toleranz is noticable, so much so that there is a special derogatory term for the self important city folk, used among non city dwellers "the Berliner Schnauze" - the near word in english is the snout of a pig dog or similar.

Mike

PS better explained here

Having driven in Germany, that has 2 sides. "Ich hab' recht, Ich fahre" - "I have right of way, I'm going (and stuff the rest of you....) " also applies, so expect no sypathy if you are waiting for someone to let you in, especialy around Berlin - the general lack of toleranz is noticable, so much so that there is a special derogatory term for the self important city folk, used among non city dwellers "the Berliner Schnauze" - the near word in english is the snout of a pig dog or similar.

Mike

PS better explained here