The silvery Tiete

摘要

A BRAZILIAN radio programme broadcast in 1990, "The Meeting of the Rivers", compared the condition of London's River Thames with Sao Paulo's Tiete. The Thames had been reborn, starting from when Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer, began to build sewers that diverted the filth downstream. The Tiete was choking in waste from 33,000 factories and sewage from 13m people, more than four-fifths of it untreated. The river was biologically dead as far as Barra Bonita, 260km downstream from Sao Paulo city.