The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  There is a mid-level sewer that requires inspection. A nearby park is genteel in darkness, and there is beauty down the manhole, too, in the form of a spiral brick staircase, glistening with damp and other things best not inquired into. “This is an original Bazalgette,” says one of the two men preceding me. Then he stops dead.

  “Fat.”

  Fat?

  “Here, look.”

  The stairs are stuffed with blocks of solid, congealed fat. The industry term is FOG, for Fat, Oil, and Grease. Flushers hate it even more than Q-tips. Faced with this degree of FOG there is only defeat and retreat. Up above, Dave the flusher lets rip. “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. Flushers still talk of the Leicester Square fat blockage which took three months to remove. Once, Dave’s gang was hammering away at a whole wall of FOG, and another gang was doing the same at the other end, until the wall started shifting and nearly squashed the gang on the other side.

  Flushers are phlegmatic about feces or toilet paper or condoms. But they hate fat. “That’s what smells,” says Dave. “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. Prevention would be better. Restaurants are supposed to have fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to get collected fat carted away, so many restaurants dispose of it down the sewer instead. Leicester Square’s restaurants are no more responsible than Victorian London’s cesspool owners were. Who’s going to find out? Most sewers are only visited when something goes wrong, and monitoring is light. 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. They may be in pretty good condition, but sometimes they don’t work.

  In an average year in the UK, 6,000 homeowners find sewage has backed up into their houses or gardens. Consider for example the troubles of Sonia Young, who spent 100 days cleaning her garden of its unintended sewage pond feature, or new mum Elizabeth Powell in Bath, forced to escape upstairs with her two-week-old baby from a flood of sewage that reached her knees. In 2003, the Court of Appeal at the House of Lords, the UK’s highest-level judiciary body, heard the case of Peter Marcic, resident of Old Church Lane in the London suburb of Stanmore. Between 1993 and 1996, Marcic found sewage backed up in his garden once a year. It happened again—twice in 1997, not once in 1998, four times in 1999, and five times in 2000. During the hearings, the Lords seemed shocked by several things: that a modern-day wastewater treatment infrastructure can still spew sewage into a residential home, and that it is considered normal. That “sewerage undertakers,” as the water utilities are known, are only obliged to compensate the homeowner for the cost of his annual sewerage rates, usually around £125. That insurance companies, faced with costs of between £15,000 and £30,000 per sewer flooding incident, sometimes refuse to pay up. Under the 1875 Public Health Act, still in force, local authorities are obliged to make “such sewers as may be necessary for effectually draining their district.” “Effectually” is vague enough to leave room for loopholes and to get out of infrastructural upgrades. In some ways, this is understandable, as water utilities get no extra public subsidy for infrastructure costs and must pay for them out of water and sewer rates, but any rise in bills unfailingly causes public outrage. (A few months after raising water bills by 21 percent in 2005, Thames Water’s four directors were awarded bonuses totaling £1.26 million, a rise of 62 percent from the previous year.)

  A 2004 parliamentary committee was appalled by testimony from water industry officials about sewage backups. “Would you say,” inquired a committee member of the head of England and Wales’s water regulators Ofwat, “that sewage ending up in your living room is about the worst service failure that can happen to anybody?” The man from Ofwat had to agree. “Short of threats to life and limb and health,” he admitted, “it is one of the most unpleasant events that can happen to any household.”

  Bazalgette’s sewers may have saved London from cholera and made miracles out of brick and water, but even he couldn’t defeat decay, pinched resources, and a failure to upgrade. “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.

  _______

  It’s a hot afternoon in Queens, New York, and for the first and probably last time in my life, I am stopping traffic, with the assistance of half a dozen fit young men and four large trucks belonging to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The men have been asked to show me a regulator sewer, a visit that took months of begging to arrange. The process began with a redoubtable woman in the DEP press office who declared that there was no way I’d ever get into the city’s sewers, and did I know how many people phoned her to ask the same question? But the redoubtable woman could be bypassed, and the bypass ended up in the office of Deputy Commissioner Douglas Greeley, an affable man with a hell of a job, because he is in charge of New York’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants (London, by contrast, has three).

  When I’d called him from London to arrange the appointment, he’d been helpful but doubtful. “You’ll have to do several hours of close confinement training. Then you’ll need to get a security check.” Then he said “9/11!” as if he didn’t need to say more. Precaution is understandable and probably overdue: terrorist attacks on drinking water supplies are usually planned for, but not on sewage facilities. (When an employee at a Washington, D.C., treatment plant showed me the railway trucks that until recently took liquid chloride down to the river to purify the effluent, he said, “We really dodged a bullet there. Any terrorist could have blown up those trucks and killed ten thousand people. Luckily, terrorists are stupid.”) Sewers have always had security issues: Leon Trotsky ordered Moscow’s sewers to be checked for opponents with bad intentions. The most sensitive sewers in London—which Rob Smith won’t identify on a map, but which definitely include one running under Buckingham Palace—have sensors linked to police stations, so that flushers doing a job below who haven’t alerted the right control center risk emerging to find several gun barrels pointing in their upcoming direction.

  Eventually, vetting was deemed done, my time spent in London’s sewers counted as close confinement training, and Greeley passed me on to “a happy Irishman who will look after you.” The happy Irishman is in charge of Collections North, a department with a dull name and an important job—important because they keep the pumping stations and tide gates working. Pumping stations pump up the flow when gravity isn’t enough, or when gravity is going in the wrong direction. Some are three stories deep. The tide gates date from the days when sewers—wooden pipes back then—ran under the piers where ocean liners docked. Tide-gate discharges—outfalls—were accepted for decades, Greeley tells me, “until passengers thought the smell was too great when they were getting off the boat. People would go to the beach and there would be something like black mayonnaise all over it, and it was like a horror show.”

  Greeley has shelves full of water and sanitation books in his office, a piece of original wooden water pipe mounted on his wall, and a lively inter
est in New York water history, clean and foul. He can and does talk about it for hours. He explains that sewer construction was slower than London’s and more piecemeal. 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. “They were thinking, damn the economics of it, we’re going to build for a hundred and something years from now. That thinking went into our older structures, the reservoirs, the aqueducts. The water system was built for the ages. The sewer system, on the other hand? ‘Only do what we have to.’”

  Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s sewers were rationally laid out, thanks to a sewerage commission that traveled to Europe to learn from Hamburg (the first European city to lay modern sewers) and London. Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx fared worse. “They used to be farms. By the time they opened up, the city couldn’t catch up. It was always anticipated that the city would be able to catch up, but that was sixty years ago.” Greeley says his sewers are also in quite good condition, as they are regularly sprayed with concrete, which helps prevent wear and tear. That’s not to say that the DEP couldn’t do with more money for upgrades. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation’s infrastructure every few years. In 2000, wastewater infrastructure got a D. By 2005, it was a D-minus. In 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that a quarter of the nation’s sewer pipes were in poor or very poor condition. By 2020, the proportion of crumbling, dangerous sewer pipes will be 50 percent.

  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 yo
ur 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.