The Big Necessity (6 page)

This isn't the only pressing problem. Greeley's life is more difficult because when the nineteenth-century sewerage commission came back from Europe and made its decision, it was the wrong one. At the time, there were two major design choices for sewer systems. The first separates sewage from storm water and is called a separate sewer system (SSS). The second does not. 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.

Sewer designers try to plan for excessive rainfall by installing storm tanks at points along the system and as emergency reservoirs at wastewater treatment plants. When more rain than expected falls, it can be held safely and the sewers will not flood. But a tenth of an inch of rain, falling in a short space of time, can overwhelm the tanks. Then, the system does what it's designed to do in such circumstances: it discharges raw, untreated sewage into the nearest body of water. Such discharges are called CSOs (combined sewer overflows), and they are far commoner than most people think. In New York, according to the environmental group Riverkeeper, there is generally one CSO a week, and the average weekly polluted discharge is about 500 million gallons, an amount that would fill 2,175 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Nationwide, according to the EPA, the wastewater industry discharges 1.46 trillion gallons—I can't conceive how many swimming pools that is—into the country's waterways and oceans.

“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. We watch a crab tootling between the floating barriers that are supposed to direct wet weather discharge into the bay, next to a sign that tells people to call 311, New York's nonemergency hotline, if they see sewage pouring out in dry
weather. “That's a no-no,” says Buckley. Wet weather discharge is normal. It's how the system works, whether people know it or not. Sewer designers calculate their system capacity to cope with storms and floods. New York's sewers, built in drier, less globally warmed times, were built to cope with a maximum of 1.75 inches of rain falling in an hour. But times and the weather have changed. Buckley only has anecdotes to back him up, but he swears storms are getting more frequent and more intense.

On August 8, 2007, 3.5 inches of rain fell in two hours in Manhattan, and 4.26 inches in Brooklyn. The subway system failed: this was more water than their pumps could cope with, and the tracks were flooded. The Metropolitan Transport Authority blamed the DEP, saying it couldn't discharge the water because the sewers were already full; the DEP blamed the MTA. In fact, as then-governor Eliot Spitzer said, neither was really to blame, because “we have a design issue that we need to think about.” 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. Fish died in the hundreds. Newspapers called it “The Lesser Stink.” The newly formed Rowers Against Thames Sewage (RATS) organized a rowing event on the same stretch of river that hosts the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. The Turd Race saw two boats—Gashaz and Biohaz—tow giant inflatable feces for half a mile, with the rowers all clad in gas masks. Biohaz stormed to victory. A parliamentary inquiry expressed “abhorrence at this legitimized pollution and the depressing attitude with which it is accepted,” and eventually, after fifteen years of procrastination, the government approved plans for a £2 billion interceptor stormwater tunnel to run under the Thames.

And what about New York, city of confident skyscrapers built over an increasingly fragile infrastructure? The subways started working again, a New Yorker friend tells me, “and that was it. Everyone forgot about it.”

_______

 

The men are ready to go down the hole. I'm wearing a Tyvek suit, made from the same material that weatherproofs houses under construction. 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. Down the ladder, the team leader, a handsome ponytailed man named Steve, shines his flashlight up at the corner, where several dozen of the biggest roaches I've ever seen immediately set about scurrying into safe darkness. Steve grins. “It's okay, they're not roaches. They're waterbugs.”

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.”

I'd seen one rat in London's sewers, and no asterisks were provoked. The flushers must have been disappointed, because they started on the rat tales as soon as I got out of the hole. There was the story of fearsome Jack, a flusher famed throughout London for his ability to kill with his hard hat. Keith preferred his shovel. Dave had had one run up his arm on a ladder. Happy had seen one the length of his forearm. Honest.

The New York collections men are no different. They see rats all the time, and despite professing respect for their habitat, Kevin will often
dispatch them into the flow with a whack from a bat he carries. “They can swim, but it's so fast, they won't survive that.” The worst thing about rats, says Steve, “is waiting for that big wet slap on your back.”

No, says Kevin. It's knowing you're being watched, but not knowing who's watching and from where. London's sewer rats generally run away from humans. New York's don't. “They come at you,” says Steve. I must look disbelieving, wondering if flushermen and fishermen exaggerate alike, because the men are indignant, and look to each other for confirmation. “Really! They'll jump on you, no problem.” Kevin swears there's a rat near the river who's so fearsome, it once climbed up the manhole ladder. “And the rungs are very far apart.”

The sewers also produce less troublesome fauna. In a tank at New York's Ward's Island treatment plant, twelve turtles live happily in clear water, having been rescued from the grit chambers that screen the flow before it heads under the East River to a facility in Brooklyn. A Russian worker saunters past and mutters “good soup,” but the turtles are well looked after, especially considering that soup is what they would have become if they'd gone through the gritters. The turtles are the small, pet-shaped variety. Huge snapper turtles end up in the system, too, but they're taken and put back in the river. Or so they say. They would also make good soup.

New York's sewer workers are a cheery lot. Morale seems healthy, and better than that of their London colleagues, who told me gloomily that they didn't like coming to work anymore, and that “shit [was] going to pot.” Steve's wife doesn't like “the shit factor,” and refused to watch a TV program on dirty jobs that would have showed her what he did, but he seems unbowed. He likes his career and he thinks it's a valuable one. He tells me that of course he grew up dreaming of becoming a sewage treatment worker, before his sarcasm is leavened with a smile.

He could have, if he'd watched enough TV reruns. Unlike their British counterparts, American sewer workers can reflect in the glory of a much-loved sitcom character from the 1950s. Millions of Americans remember—and loved—the character of Ed Norton in
The Honeymooners
, a sewer worker with an endless supply of wastewater witticisms, most of them involving lying back and floating. 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”?)

The competition is taken seriously—there are Operators' Challenge trophy cabinets in every treatment plant I visit—even if the team names lack gravitas. The Ward's Island Ninja Turtles compete with the Bowery Bay Bowl Busters and the Tallman Island Turd Surfers. The media treat it with humor, referring to it as the Sludge Olympics, and coverage brings prestige. “It's genuinely good for improving skills,” says Buckley, who adds that much of the work is achieved “with brute strength and ingenuity.” He tells with pride of his most ingenious hour, when he traced a catastrophic spill of boiler oil in a local creek two miles back up the sewer line, right to the basement of the apartment building that was sending it into the sewer. He got commendations; the offender got a $3 million cleanup bill. He says his investigative technique involved sticking his head down manholes and stopping at the first clean spot of sewer he saw.

This is a skilled job, and it's sought after, though not for the salaries. The newest team member is Edwin, a tattooed man, whose low rank is obvious because it's his leg that men grab onto for balance when they're going down the holes. Edwin earns $15 an hour. The most senior crew member only gets $21. I suspect they'd earn more cleaning toilets. More attractive are stability and benefits, crucial in a country where the only health care on offer has to be paid for. That's what attracted Buckley, when he got off the plane from London in the 1970s and didn't want to be “the stereotypical Irish navvy.” The only thing lacking for job satisfaction is a proper New York nickname.

At a manhole in La Guardia Airport, Buckley is showing me another tide gate, shining light into the hole with a mirror and sunlight (“better than any flashlight”) when a Port Authority cop stops by. He asks what we're doing, and when Buckley replies, “Looking for alligators,” nods
with no apparent disbelief before moving in for a peer. I ask the cop why they're known as New York's finest, why firefighters are New York's bravest, and even prison officers at Rikers Island are New York's boldest, but the men who keep sewage flowing, and keep disease away, have nothing. He shrugs. He doesn't know or care. Buckley laughs. “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.

They could be New York's damnedest, working with a system that is heinously expensive to maintain and upgrade, excessively wasteful of water, and easily defeated by less than half an inch of rain. Greeley knows that flooding could be minimized if the rain had somewhere else to go beside a sewer, such as into the earth. But New York—and London—have blocked off all natural drainage by concreting over much of their surface area. Patio gardens also have a lot to answer for. Greeley talks wistfully of Seattle's Street Edge Alternative (SEA) streets, where asphalt is removed and replaced by wide borders of whatever encourages the natural percolation of water downward (earth, turf, pebbles). Similar plans have been proposed as part of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Sustainable City initiative. Even in London, where homeowners have been allowed to pave over the equivalent of twenty-two Hyde Parks in ten years, the government has announced that covering earth with anything other than porous materials will now require planning permission. I ask Greeley if he has the money for things like SEA streets. “No. That's the tragedy.”

I also ask him the question I put to everyone I meet who works in or with wastewater. If they had to design the system again from scratch, would they do it differently? Would they, as former president Teddy Roosevelt did, question the original concept of flushing? “Civilized people,” Roosevelt said in 1910, “ought to know how to dispose of sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water.” Greeley considers the question with a long pause. “It's true that waterborne sewerage is very problematic.” But a return to on-site sanitation, whether privies or private treatment plants, is no solution. “People wouldn't look after them properly. There'd be disease outbreaks.”