The squeegee is a vehicle having a tank and a revolving rubber roller, which washes the pavement as the vehicle moves along the street and the water from the tank is sprinkled in front of the roller. Hose flushing is used in cities having graded streets and sufficient water supply. Street flushers have pressure tanks which depend for their pressure either upon the pressure from the water mains or upon the pressure obtained from a pump operated by a gasoline engine. The latter plan gives the better results.
Whinery is of the opinion that on well paved streets the most efficient and satisfactory method so far devised with the apparatus now available is hand cleaning by the patrol system by day, followed with hose or flushing wagons or scrubbing squeegees during the night. While this is somewhat more expensive than plain machine sweeping he thinks that no other method yet devised will produce equally clean streets at a lower cost.
Gustave H. Hanna says: “The use of flushers has proven not only the cheapest but the most satisfactory method of street cleaning that our experience in Cleveland has been able to develop. Statistics of the department show an average cost of 15.3 cents per square of 10,000 square feet for flushing to which must be added practically 9 cents for pick-up work, a total of some 24 cents per square as against 42 cents for work with White Wings. The White Wings are too convenient and necessary an adjunct to be wholly displaced under any consideration. Down town streets must be swept continually during the day and the hand sweeper with his small cart can also work to advantage in gutters of residential streets collecting dirt that has either been flushed or blown to the curb; but so far as our experience goes, the lessening of cleaning cost by cheaper methods means simply the extension of the use of flushers at every practical point.
“There is an argument of sanitation in favor of flushing. Hand sweeping causes a certain amount of dust and mechanical sweeping usually causes still more. I am opposed to the use of simple sprinkling as a means of laying dust. Ammonia and other products leach out of damp manure and form a scum on the surface that is nearly impossible to remove, and makes pavement slippery and foul smelling.