2020-03-13
46 分钟Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin,
Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that Pompey's new drain system is 2,300 years old.
Yeah so this is in Pompey,
they have a set of storm drains underneath the city that were several meters down so they weren't really affected when Vesuvius hit and I don't think any storm drain would have been able to drain away the lava from Vesuvius.
That's a good point.
But yeah so there's this system which they're 450 meters long,
they're quite big so
if you're a human you can crawl along it without too much discomfort and it turns out they've been looked into,
they're so clean and empty and well built
that they're going to be used again for modern profit and they're looking into another stretch of 500 meters of drains just to see
if we can open those up as well.
So this kind of system is for taking water that comes out of rivers or comes from the air and taking it down to the sea.
It's not so much for sewage right because this is what the Roman sewers were all about.
If you had a toilet in your house it would probably go into a cesspit, it wouldn't be attached to the sewage system.
Every now and then they could do but the problem was there was no grating between the sewer and your toilet and so
if you had a toilet and you attached it to the sewer everything could come the other way as well as you said.