August 23, 2016
“Though the men accompanying me have worked in the sewers for decades, they cannot know every inch of a vast network nor what is likely to be discharged into it. Some sewers haven’t been visited in fifteen years. It’s best to be prepared. And indemnified: a paper-suited man thrusts a form at me as I struggle with my crotch-high waders (items of clothing that would make members of the online Yahoo! sewer-boots fetish group—which does exist—speechless with one emotion or another). He says, “Sign this,” and gives me no time to read it. “Don’t worry,” he says, with no smile. “It just means if you collapse, I get all your money.” This humor helps in a hard job, and there will be more of it.”
August 23, 2016
“My escorts include one consultant, one senior engineer, and several wastewater operatives. Their names are Dave and Keith and Rob and Happy, but in the language of those who work in the city’s sewers, they’re all flushers. The name is no longer used officially, because it describes the job in times past when men waded into the silt of a sewer and dislodged blockages with brooms and rakes, and opened inlets to flush river water into the tunnels to nudge the flow down into the Thames. They’re wastewater operatives now, but they do what the flushers did: they keep the flow flowing.”
August 23, 2016
“The number of flushers is a less slippery figure. At the time of my visit, it was 39. Thames Water claims more efficient equipment has reduced manpower needs. The flushers see it differently, muttering about outside contractors doing the job that only they know how to do best, and about asset-stripping in the boardroom.”
August 23, 2016
“All the flushers know is that they’re heading toward retirement, that the sewer knowledge they carry in their heads is irreplaceable (and unwritten), and that they could use some more staff, though only men like themselves. Sewers have always been a man’s world. In London, they’re a white, working-class man’s world. There are few jobs left that are as monochrome and monosexual. There are female engineers who do sewer surveys, sometimes. But no one can remember a woman applying to be a flusher. Even black London cab drivers—who share the banter, skin color, and accents of the flushers—have reluctantly welcomed some women”
August 23, 2016
“Smith is now a senior engineer, a few rungs on the wastewater ladder above a flusher, and he doesn’t need to go into the sewers anymore. But, he says, “I can’t be responsible for the safety of my men without knowing the environment.” So down he goes, regularly enough, sometimes with a journalist or prince in tow. Thames Water runs open days at its Abbey Mills pumping station where visitors are served sandwiches and tea then led into the trunk sewer below. (It is considered sensible to serve food before seeing the sewers, not the other way around.) Smith has seen all sorts. “Prince Charles came once, down the sewers. We’ve had lords and ladies. They’re all the same once they get down there. If anything happens and someone needs to be pulled out, nobody gets priority. A sewer is a great leveler.”
August 23, 2016
“They get down, take a sniff, say, ‘Is that poo?’ I say yes. They say, ‘It doesn’t smell much, does it?’ They think that because when they go to the toilet, it smells, that this will, too. They think it’ll smell like three million toilets.” This is not a bad odor. It’s musty, cloying, and damp, but it doesn’t stink. It’s diluted, after all. Without water, the average human produces 77 pounds of excrement and 132 gallons of urine a year. Add toilet flushes, and the total jumps to 4,000 gallons. Thanks to the WC, the flow is 98 percent water.”
August 23, 2016
“In olden days, sewers had hunters called “toshers.” They moved into the sewers from the banks of the river, in search of discarded riches. Sometimes they found gold; sometimes they lost their lives. There are still sewer hunters today, and there is cause: the flushers find all sorts of things in the flow. Bits of motorbikes (easily shoved down a two-foot-wide manhole), baby strollers, goldfish. Coins, sometimes, and jewelry. Cell phones by the hundred (one recent survey concluded that 850,000 handsets a year are inadvertently flushed down British toilets). That’s all due to haplessness, but there’s also ignorance.”
August 23, 2016
“Bras are also unwanted: in June 2007, a lingerie set flushed down a toilet clogged sewers in County Durham, collapsed a road, and caused £15,000 in repairs. “Throwaway society,” says Smith. “My goldfish has died? Throw it down the toilet. My hand grenade doesn’t work? Throw it down the toilet.”
August 23, 2016
“Humor helps because the work is hard. The pay isn’t great, there are shampoo bills, and then there are the daily grievances, like Q-tips. “They are the bane of our lives,” says Smith. “If someone had searched for something that could clean your ear and also stick perfectly in the six-millimeter holes of a sieve [filter], they couldn’t have done better.” He shines his light on a pipe mouth to one side, encased with something I can’t recognize, dripped solid like stalactites. “Concrete. Unbelievable. Someone’s just poured liquid concrete down a drain.” The liquid has now hardened, embracing and defeating the black pipe it arrived down, a sign of shortsighted selfishness.”
August 23, 2016
“Since its beginnings as a trading center on a useful river, London dealt with its excrement as other settlements did, with what is known today as “on-site sanitation.” In short, this meant that its citizens generally did their business in a designated, confined place. It was a private matter unregulated by any authority and done mostly in a privy,”
August 23, 2016
“The private matter of excretion spilled into public life in many ways. There were unemptied, overflowing cesspools, like the one into which Samuel Pepys trod in 1660, when he ventured into his cellar to find it filled with the contents of his neighbor’s privy. There was the common practice of slopping out, when chamber pot contents were flung from windows in the early morning, which made for unpleasant streets, especially since pavements were not common. There is a theory that the popularity of high heels dates from this time,”
August 23, 2016
“By modern standards of smell and hygiene, London was disgusting. So was everywhere else. Over the Channel in Paris, contemporary accounts tell of grand aristocrats regularly soiling the corridors at Versailles and the Palais Royal. At Versailles, the garden designer Le Nôtre deliberately planted tall hedges to serve as de facto stall partitions. The eighteenth-century writer Turneau de la Morandière described the Versailles of Louis XV as “the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors—the passageways, corridors, and courtyards are filled with urine and fecal matter.” Waste matters in the Kremlin were no better, and toilet facilities only improved because it was feared all that excreta would corrode the gold.”
August 23, 2016
“There was too much waste to dispose of and inflation didn’t help: the cesspool emptying fee was by now a shilling, twice the average laborer’s daily wage. Also, the gradual introduction of the flush toilet increased the amount of water to be dealt with. Faced with expense and hassle, people did what people still do, and illegally dumped their cesspool contents into the nearest pond, river, or sewer.
”
August 23, 2016
“But most ancient societies did not think of using water to transport waste because they didn’t need to. The volume of waste and of people could be satisfied with on-site containment and removal services. Even after toilets became popular, it remained illegal for London’s citizens to connect their waste pipes to the sewers. It had to go somewhere. By 1840, as the Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt testified before the Parliamentary Select Committee into the Health of Towns, “The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.”
August 23, 2016
“The Victorian century gave us many wondrous things, but one of my favorites is the now-lapsed vocation of sanitarian, a word taken by men who occupied themselves with the new discipline of “public health.” The most famous was Edwin Chadwick, a difficult character who left a legacy of reforms that were magnificent—the 1848 Public Health Act, for one—but also mistaken and deadly.”
August 23, 2016
“Chadwick decided the solution was to organize and expand the sewer system, but to use it for sewage—a word newly invented—and to discharge the sewage into the Thames. It might hurt the river, he reasoned, but it would save people’s health. Sewers were built and did as he said they would. And the Thames ran browner and thicker, and people drank it, and cholera loved it. There were fulminations against filth in newspapers and Parliament, but nothing was done. The medical establishment, in these pre-Pasteur times, was still convinced that disease was spread by contagion via miasmas, or bad air.”
August 23, 2016
“It took a long dry summer to force change, and because of the foulness of the air, not of the water. In 1858, the weather and the sewage-filled Thames came together disastrously to form the “Great Stink,” when the river reeked so awfully that the drapes on the waterfront windows of the Houses of Parliament were doused with chloride to mask the smell. ”
August 23, 2016
“Fat! It costs millions to clean up. Restaurants pour it down the drains, it solidifies and it blocks the sewers.” They used to use road drills to remove it, he says—“big RD-9 jobs!”—until new health and safety regulations came into force, and jobs that had been done for years were judged now to be too dangerous.”
August 23, 2016
“Not shit. Fat gets into your pores. You get out and you have a shower at the depot and you smell fine, then you get home and you smell again.” They grimace. “Disgusting stuff.” It is also expensive stuff. Half of the 100,000 blockages every year in London are caused by it. It costs at least £6 million a year to remove. “Contractors do it now,” says a flusher, before muttering “or they don’t, more like.” High-pressure hoses flush out some blockages. Thames Water has been trying out robot fat removers and already uses remotely operated cameras to see what’s what, but for now the best weapons against an unceasing and superior enemy are water, force, and curses.”
August 23, 2016
“Sewer workers are firefighters: they respond to crisis. In most areas of the UK, only 20 percent of sewers are inspected regularly, and by the end of this century, many of the UK’s 186,000 miles of sewers will be 250 years old.”
August 23, 2016
“ “If Bazalgette hadn’t built his sewers when he did,” Rob Smith tells me, “we would—literally—be in the shit today.” If Bazalgette’s sewers aren’t maintained, we will be again.”
August 23, 2016
“. In the nineteenth century, each of the five New York boroughs had autonomy and a president. Each president got around to sewer construction when he felt like it. It wasn’t considered urgent. There was no Great Stink to focus priorities. Drinking water was a different matter.”
August 23, 2016
“ The water system was built for the ages. The sewer system, on the other hand? ‘Only do what we have to.’”
August 23, 2016
“A combined sewer system (CSS) puts water from all sources—street, bathroom, and anywhere else—into the same pipes. It is cheaper and easier to construct, which is why New York’s sewer designers probably chose it. But it has one powerfully weak spot: rain.”
August 23, 2016
“Look,” says Kevin Buckley. “It’s either discharge or it comes up in people’s basements.” Buckley, the happy Irishman who has organized the traffic-stopping exercise in Queens, has taken me over the road to see the nearby outfall into Jamaica Bay.”
August 23, 2016
“In its report Swimming in Sewage, the Natural Resources Defense Council expressed exasperation that “the nation at the forefront of the information age has about as clear a view of the quantity of sewage that leaks, spills, and backs up each year as we do of the sewage pipes buried beneath our feet.” When a catastrophic overflow happened in London in 2004, and 600,000 tons of raw sewage poured into the Thames, people did notice.”
August 24, 2016
“I don’t have breathing equipment, because this is a regulator chamber—a sort of sewer intersection—with a viewing platform, and we aren’t going deep. Anyway, when I asked for a turtle, I got strange looks. (Later, I discovered that “turtle” is American sewer worker vernacular for excrement.) No helmet is offered because the chamber doesn’t warrant one, though the roaches might. I don’t mind rats, but I hate roaches. ”
August 24, 2016
“What are waterbugs?
“Roaches on steroids.”
The day before, Steve had entered a sewer he’d never been into before—not unusual, when there are six thousand miles of network—and the walls were moving. “You shine your light and they move, but if you leave them in peace, they’ll leave you alone, too.” (He always tucks his ponytail into his shirt collar in case.) The same respect goes for rats, in the main. “You’re going into their home, so you treat it with respect.” Precaution doesn’t mean indulgence, not if they’re even half the size that flushers say they are, or if they’re anything like the rats described 160 years ago to Henry Mayhew by a man from a Bermondsey granary: “Great black fellows as would frighten a lady into asterisks to see of a sudden.”
August 24, 2016
“Sewer-worker pride is also fed by the Operators’ Challenge, a nationwide annual competition set up by the Water Environment Federation, an industry body. Wastewater workers compete in several events, such as rescuing from a sewer a mannequin in danger; fixing machinery; and answering technical questions in “Wastewater Jeopardy.” (Question: The minimum design velocity in sewers to prevent solids from settling in the collections system. Answer: What is 2 feet per second? Question: The mixture of microorganisms and treated wastewater. Answer: What is “mixed liquor”?)”
August 24, 2016
“We’re New York’s stinkiest.” Sometimes New York’s bravest can’t do without New York’s stinkiest: Douglas Greeley remembers the police asking for his men’s help in retrieving a dead mafioso who had been thrown down a manhole. Another time, the item being retrieved was a broomstick discarded by certain police officers who had used it to sodomize a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima. “It was very humid, and the police department internal affairs division had spread canvas sheets out on the street. They closed the street and we scooped every catch basin, and we were pulling out all kinds of broomsticks. We had to lay them down on the canvas and then they would categorize them, measure them and do samples. In 95-degree weather.” They found it. Louima was eventually awarded $5.3 million in damages against the city, the largest police brutality settlement in its history. The contribution of sewer workers to the investigation went unnoticed.”
Notes From: Rose George. “The Big Necessity.” iBooks.
