Sludge Watch ==> Ohio sewer visit story: Phi Beta Crapper

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Here is a reporter touring the sewers and treatment plant.
Note the high presence of diesel fuel in the sewer mix.

I am astonished every time I encounter Toronto sewage sludge.
The slick shiney black muck looks like something scrapped out of the bottom 
of a petroleum tank.

Interestingly the 'fraternity' of sewer workers is a cultural fact that goes 
back to the early days of the Paris sewers 150 years ago (our sewers are 
really quite young).  Due to the danger of the work- drowning, disease, 
rats, and inhalation of lethal gases...the sewer workers developed strong 
bonds of cooperation and loyalty to each other, and strong movement to 
occupational health and safety ethics.
(see the excellent book: Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and 
Representations by Donald Reid )

A pity that this ethic doesn't extend to the sludge spreading 
industry...which downplays and ignores the risks to public health and worker 
safety.

Watch the sludge spreaders in your community.  Do they have eyewash 
stations?  Do they wear gloves and boots?  Do they refrain from eating and 
smoking on the job?  Do they change their footwear when they get in the 
truck at the end of the shift (think what the air conditioner is blowing 
around the cab of the car/truck)?  Do they use commercial laundries for 
their work clothes?

All these are requirements for Occupational Health and Safety for most North 
American jurisdictions.

Even in the areas where worker protection requirements are honored, there is 
no protection for the communities and residents where they spread the 
sludges.



.................................................


Daring reporter does deep dive into sludge duty
Monday, June 04, 2007

Hard hat? Check. Coveralls? Check. Armpit-length rubber gloves? Check. 
Safety harness? Check. Chest waders? Check.

Wait! Chest waders?

Well, yeah. If you're going to stand in a Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer Dis 
trict pump sta tion and suck up sludge - and you know exactly what that 
sludge really is - you'd better have on chest waders.



And that's what I did on a bright, sunny day that brought an end to April. 
Tethered to a safety chain and suspended from a steel tripod, I descended 20 
feet into the Jennings Road Pump Station and came face to feces with my 
inner Ed Norton.

For all who scoff that these assignments haven't been dirty enough to 
justify borrowing from cable's Mike Rowe and "Dirty Jobs," I say, "Happy 
now?"

What may surprise you is that though dirty, it's not as bad as you might 
think. Oh, I'm not saying that the pump station will show up on the Travel 
Channel's greatest getaways, but for a place that handles 1.8 million 
gallons of water, pee and poo every day (more during "rain events," which is 
sewer-district-speak for storms), it was less gross than I expected.

That is, as long as I didn't think about what I was walking in.

That may have been the purpose of the briefing by manager Tom Madej, health 
and safety coordinator Jim Carrell and supervisors Wilson Rivera and Dale 
Kramer. I heard words like flow, sludge, grit and the aforementioned "rain 
event." Nobody said P&P.

So when operator technician Greg Mitchell and field tech Eduardo "Little E" 
Lozada and I descended to the mushy pump station floor, it seemed like we 
were trudging through a bog. The strongest smell wasn't the rotten-egg 
stench of human waste, but diesel fuel. You're not supposed to dispose of 
diesel fuel in a sewer, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

I felt safer knowing Lozada was carrying an air tester. It measures oxygen, 
lower explosive limits (i.e. fumes that can go boom) and carbon monoxide.




The water here - and it is mostly water; remember, every time you flush, 
your toilet sends 1.6 gallons of water cascading downstream - is chilly. The 
temperature in the sewers is about 50 degrees in the winter and maybe 60 or 
65 in the summer. The walls were dank and slimy, and spotted white with 
calcium, as they are in all 280 miles of sewer the district maintains.

The junction chamber catches a lot of sludge and grit, so it has to be 
cleaned out to maintain a good flow. Field tech operator Don Hamilton 
cranked up the huge jet-vac truck parked over our heads. Lozada bounced the 
6-inch suction tube up and down on the sludge below our feet, then passed it 
to me.

If I remember basic geometry, the circumference of a circle is pi times the 
diameter, so the vacuum tube is a bit more than 18 inches around. Pretty 
unwieldy. Factor in that the thing is sucking up water and, well, you know - 
it's really unwieldy. With my boots rapidly sinking in quickpoo, I scooped 
the tube along the bottom just long enough for my arms to feel like they 
were about to fall off. Then Lozada's air tester beeped. I didn't even 
bother faking disappointment at our required exit.


We moved to the pump station itself so that I could use a big-toothed hand 
rake to clean the bar screen, which helps capture some of the things that 
shouldn't be in a sanitary sewer line, such as leaves, cans and the like. 
During those "rain events," storm drains sometimes overflow into the 
"sanis," as they're called, which usually is how the nonorganic flotsam gets 
there.

>From the Jennings site, we motored over to the Southwest Interceptor at 
Schaaf Lane, where field tech operator Tom Rock - a man his co-workers call 
Silverback, like the gorillas - and I stepped into a carnival ride the guys 
call a "man cage."

Rock and I were lowered 60 feet onto a grated floor to inspect the access 
shaft. Beneath the grate, sewage rushed by at a speed that made me think of 
river rapids in West Virginia. That's a good thing, Rock said. If it's 
flowing, we can keep going (so to speak) with no worries.

I finished my day with the team at Brookside Park, "walking" a storm water 
outlet pipe that runs from the parking lot beneath a baseball diamond to the 
discharge site probably 400 yards or so away. Rivera led this little 
spelunking adventure, with help from safety expert Carrell.

After the summer athletic seasons, much of the pipe, which is about 10 feet 
across and 5½ feet high, resting on a brick base most likely laid in the 
late 19th or early 20th century, will have to be replaced. It's already been 
repaired where the corrugated steel has bowed.

Once it happens, it'll fall to Madej and his men to maintain it. And they'll 
do it with pride.

The crew has dubbed 50-year-old Scot Reppa "Dad." He's first with a joke, 
but also first to grab your hand to make sure you're OK; these fellows take 
care of one another.

"It's a [bleepy] job," Reppa quipped - it's not hard to figure out what 
bleepy means - "and it's a dangerous job."

You have to have the other guy's back to do a job most of us don't think 
about until there's a problem, and they do. As Reppa said, "It's almost like 
a fraternity."

In that case, I'm flush with excitement at being the newest pledge to Phi 
Beta Crappa.

Plain Dealer reporter Chuck Yarborough is moonlighting at a variety of 
unusual, scary and dirty jobs. Got something you'd like him to do? Contact 
him at cyarborough at plaind.com, call 216-999-4534 or write Chuck Yarborough 
c/o The Plain Dealer, 1801 Superior Ave., Cleveland OH 44114.