Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Natural or artificial?
and Austria, but the investigations uncovered no irregularities concerning the construction of either the waterworks or the mains system. It was found, however, that the capacity of the waterworks was limited to the satisfactory supply of the Inner City only, whereon the authorities decreed that industrial customers use exclusively unfiltered Danube water and that no further customers' applications be considered. In the meantime, the Municipal Chemist’s office established that the heavy pollution of the Danube rendered its water completely unsuitable for drinking and domestic use for most periods of the year. The risk of an epidemic related to the consumption of unfiltered water prodded the municipality to find an urgent solution. To ensure an uninterrupted supply of high quality, pure water, the municipality of Pest purchased, in 1872, the Újpest Dockland Island for the purposes of constructing a permanent waterworks with a daily capacity of 125,000 cubic metres, but the completion of the investment was left to the authorities of the unified capital. The Waterworks Department of Budapest was set up in October of 1873 with János Wein (1829-1908) as its first supervisor. The talented mining engineer had been trained in Vienna and Selmecbánya (today's Banská Stiavnica, Slovakia) before he moved to Buda, where he soon became Lindley’s associate. In view of Budapest’s favourable geographical location he favoured, unlike his boss, natural purification, i. e. reliance on the layers of gravel along the Danube as a water filter. His ideas met with widespread opposition, including the disagreement of the Board of Public Works, but Wein persisted in his opinion and managed to persuade his opponents that trial drilling should be carried out. The tests demonstrated that with Wein’s method the city of Pest could be continuously supplied with pure, high-quality and healthy water for at least 20 to 25 years. Director of Waterworks János Wein had thus won the first battle but the war was far from over as obtaining the necessary permissions took another three years due to objections raised by the BPW. Therefore the municipality could only commission Wein in 1878 to enlarge, in accordance with his earlier plans but at least to a daily capacity of 600 thousand cubic metres, the temporary waterworks. The extension was completed in November of 1879 and, as the supervisory committee found it to its greatest satisfaction, the waterworks surpassed all expectations supplying a daily amount of 760 cubic metres of clan and healthy water, and the construction had cost less than the earmarked amount. And yet the acknowledgement of Wein’s achievement provoked a heated argument in the assembly ("the municipal employees are appropriately remunerated, and it was Mr Wein's duty to turn the ideas formed in his mind about the improvement oh the waterworks to the benefit oj the community").
