Sewer ^TV

The old incinerator building on Wilbur Avenue in the city of Kingston, New York has not burned in decades. Instead it has become home for the Sewer Crew. Most of us flush and forget, but behind every municipally run sewerage system is a group of individuals, dedicated or otherwise who make that flush end up where it belongs... your local waste water treatment facility.

In the course of my employment with my local municipality I spent many days in the field with the sewer crew. Like all municipal work forces, these gentlemen know how to garner small amenities which make their odoriferous work more palatable. The small home they have made for themselves is the first evidence of this. They have created a ready room and office out of the flotsam and jetsam of curbside rejects available throughout the city every day of regular garbage pick-up. They have a comfortable niche in which to plan out the task at hand, and they are more than willing to be good hosts and offer you every amenity which they have to offer.

The task at hand is to take a modified television camera, and monitor and to videotape the sanitary and storm sewers which have caused some problems.

Most people think of Paris, underground, when they think of sewers. If they think of sewers. Younger people think of terrapins. In reality the largest sewers in Kingston range around forty-two inches in diameter. These are the older runs of sewer, built at a time when storm and sanitary flows were combined and channeled to the nearest creek. Those days are long over, and no flow containing human waste goes into a body of water before being treated. Most of the sewers I have had commerce with are made of vitrified clay pipe and range around eight inches in diameter, thwarting the attempts of even the most anorectic of ninjas to make use of them. Other types of pipe include cast iron and concrete. Recently, the law has permitted us to start using PVC, a type of plastic pipe.

Sewer pipe clog, crack, displace at the joints, or sometime roots insinuate themselves through tiny fissures and large root ball inhibit flow. This is where the trouble begins. A faint, then stronger odor of pungent putrescence filters up from the ground. Residents begin to experience a vague sense of unease, which causes them to make elected officials experience a sharp sense of unease.

Respond Unit 9. The sewer crew. But, where is the fault? Some of these problems have been occurring and recurring for over a hundred years in the same areas! Enter the camera. This ingenious device is fitted with treads, or wheels depending upon the width of the sewer and the traction within. It is hard cabled into the monitor by a nexus about an inch and a half in diameter, and it has a rope attached to it so that it can be lowered into and hoisted out of the sewer via manholes. As Alvin is to Bob Ballard, so was this small camera to us. Our eyes were taken into the murky depths of a world where no human had peered before. The turgid, cloudy flow of the effluent of a sewer pipe surrounded us via the magic of the remote lens.

Kitty Kalloo Birds⁽¹⁾ floated by, accompanied by shrouds of toilet paper and the familiar white torpedo shape of tampons. (I don't know why, exactly, but all the guys I have ever worked with on the sewer crew have felt the need to point out tampons, both to me and to one another. Men seem to have a special affinity for tampon-humor. My guess is that this off-sets either embarrassment and/or envy.) To the sides of this secret place we could see what years of rushing water, as well as rushing everything else, had done to the side of the pipe. Spalling, cracking, and in some cases total collapse.

Sometimes sewers become surcharged. This happens at peak use, when there is too much effluent to fit through the pipe. Think of the sewer system as a sort of blood stream. Little vessels join and flow into bigger vessels. These join into large lines and then finally into major trunks which serve nearly a sixth of the city each. Suddenly there is no room at the inn. Manholes begin to fill. In one case, as may happen, several manhole covers were shot into the air by the force of the fluid rushing up under them. Again, the reality of manhole covers versus the fiction must be revealed: A typical manhole cover weighs in at around sixty pounds. Larger ones are, of course, heavier. The covers are often very difficult to lift, because of their weight and because of a special entropy that makes them want to stay where they are. A sixty pound discus being tossed violently into oncoming traffic is to be avoided. These typical covers needed to be replaced by special lock down covers, and were with a speed almost unknown to the workings of government.

Surcharged sewers can not be successfully viewed with the camera. First, the colloidal mass of suspension can not be made heads nor tails of, and obscure the pipe entirely. Second, sometimes the camera gets swept away. It must be made clear that the camera is far more valuable to the municipality than any of the employees using it. Lose the camera and heads will roll! The solution to this dilemma is rather elegant. The crew will work into the wee hours of the morning, as the city sleeps.

It is surreal to be on the streets of a city when all vestiges of traffic have abated. My brethren in the metropolis might not experience this, but in Kingston there are times when the only vehicle that might pass would be a patrol car, even on our busiest thoroughfares. In the chill and quiet of the urban nocturne, there is the sewer crew. We have worked all day, and then gone home for a three hour nap and a meal, to return at 11:00 PM to the incinerator. There we don our coveralls, workboots and gloves, load our trucks and roll out.

To the casual observer we perpetuate the stereo-type, four people in the garb of public works standing around a hole in the street. In reality we are observers of the intriguing, procurers of that amenity which is so well provided that it is not granted a thought, sewerage. Here in the darkness we set up our monitor and our tripod. It takes two or three of us to safely lower the camera on its rope, hand-over-hand down a hundred feet into the depths of a main. One of us climbs down to feed the camera on its treads into the invert, which is sometimes several inches above the bottom of the manhole. The rungs, which are set into the sides of the manhole are sometimes wet, sometimes rusty, sometimes unsafe and sometime they are simply gone.

We are grateful for a breeze, it feeds us sweet night air, chasing the odor of the "honey-pot" below. We run to the thrumming tune of the generator, feeding out cable manually, one of us drives the small vehicle below the pavement by remote control, the others keep their eyes on the screen to look for flaws. We keep and audio log as well a written one. The audio goes directly onto the tape, but it is the written log which gets more use, later on in the office. Stalactites of grease, one of the sewers greatest enemies, cling in tallowy glory from the pipe. The cameras headlight illuminates them briefly, then the unit plows through them. Sometimes the grease is so built up that the camera must be pulled back and rammed forward the break through.

When the camera comes up, we will have to clean it. We have a bucket and rags for this task. We are scheduled to have inoculations against the diseases we will be exposed to for this work, but we have to wait for them. Budgetary constraints, or a lag in authorizations, who knows which? We note the damage to the pipe, but even at three or four in the morning, some of these sewers are surcharged, and we can not get an accurate reading. Some of the manholes are so full of sludge that we can not enter them to successfully feed the camera into the pipe.

It takes a long time to break down and then set up at the next manhole. The night passes quickly, and the first faint fingers of dawn are staining the dark sky scarlet. We want to make one more set-up. Coffee, warm in its paper cup, from an all night diner, warms our fingers sufficiently so that we can make the deft manipulations necessary to use our equipment. Its aroma is a fragrance capable of cutting through the smell that clings to us. We all learn to like it, whether we like it or not.

The day crew is coming in as we return to the incinerator. We are going home. None of us feels tired, exactly. I know that the guys will sleep, but I am too alert to even try.

The next day we are out again, this time on a pretty street with lots of trees and traffic. A contractor stops his truck, he knows us from the office. "Hmm." He says, "something is missing." He drives away, returning shortly with coffee and donuts. Now we look right.

1. ¹ Kitty Kalloo Birds n. my mother's pet name for human fecal matter in its floating stage. Origin is unknown, but I'm willing to entertain suggestions.