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Almost all the public services, nevertheless, were in 1909 in private hands. Electric traction was introduced in 1891-1895, and the street railways were consolidated in 1902 under one management. In 1869 the city bought,
and nine years later sold again, the waterworks; municipal ownership and control, under a sewerage and water board, was again
undertaken in 1900. In 1900 arrangements were made to transfer the extensive markets from private lessees to direct municipal
control, and in May 1901 the wharves of the city passed from private to municipal control. 2 The municipal belt railway was
constructed in 1905-1907. , Until 1900 there were no sewers, open gutters serving their purpose. It is remarkable that
the city twice granted franchises to private parties for the construction of a sewerage system, but without result. The low
and extremely level character of the city site, of which nearly one-third is at or below the level of the Gulf, the recurrence
of back-water floods from Lake Pontchartrain and the tremendous rains of the region have made the engineering problems involved
very difficult. In 1896 a Drainage Commission (merged in 1900 in a Sewerage and Water Board) devised a plan involving the
sale of street railway franchises to pay for the installation of drainage canals and pumps, and in 1899 the people voted a 2-mill tax over 42 years assuring a bond issue of 812,000,000
to pay for sewerage, drainage and water works to be owned by the municipality and to be controlled by a Sewerage and Water Board. Work was begun on the sewerage system in 1903 and on the water works
in 1905. In 1906 the legislature authorized the issue of municipal bonds for $8,000,000 to be expended on this work. Up to
1909 the drainage system had cost about $6,000,000 and the sewerage system about $5,000,000; and 310 m. of sewers and nine
sewerage pumping stations discharged sewage into the Mississippi below the centre of the city. Garbage is used to fill in
swamps and abandoned canals. The new water-supply is secured from the river and is filtered by mechanical precipitation and other means. By 1909 about 500 m. of water-mains
had been laid, $7,000,000 had been expended for the water-system, and filtering plants had been established with a capacity
of 50,000,000 gallons a day. In August 1905 a city ordinance required the screening of aerial cisterns, formerly characteristic of the city, which were breeding-places of the yellow
fever Stegomyia, and soon afterwards the state legislature authorized the Sewerage and Water Board to require the removal
of all such cisterns. About two-thirds of the street surface in 1899 was still unpaved; the first improvements in paving began
in 1890. A light yellow-fever epidemic occurred in 1897-1898-1899, after nineteen years of immunity, and a more serious one in 1905, when the United States Marine Hospital Service for a time took control of the city's
sanitation and attempted to exterminate the Stegomyia mosquito.
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/New_Orleans
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