High-Tech Tools Keep City Sewer Workers’ Journey a Cleaner One
By John Estus, The Oklahoman
Apr. 21–Everything was still on the walk down the fairway. Everything except the man in the sewer suit crawling out of the ground behind the 13th green.
A sewage line for a house next to the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club had been tied in to the wrong pipeline, sending the muck and mire from every toilet flush and disposal dump somewhere it shouldn’t be.
Enter the sewer workers, looking like superheroes in their bright yellow suits.
They worked for two weeks, digging up a small part of the course to connect the sewer line to the right pipe.
Without them, the mush could have spilled into the creek behind the green, causing golfers to curse dank smells rather than shanked shots.
Or it could have backed up into the house, creating what city sewer supervisor Hal Ogburn calls one of the “worst, most disgusting dilemmas you can possibly imagine.”
It proves what longtime sewer workers like Ogburn know all too well: Sewage is inescapable, even on the greens of a country club.
“That’s one thing everyone has in common. We’ve all got a sewer,” said Ogburn, who has spent 20 years solving stinky problems in the city’s sewers.
Tech-savvy sewers In recent years, sewer line maintenance work has changed significantly.
Workers rarely crawl into manholes to trudge through the sludge. They do most work above ground, away from the sewer rats and staggering stench.
Robotic cameras are dropped into the pipes to find problems. Sewage backups are unclogged with all manner of sophisticated tools. The mess is removed with high-powered pumps that work like vacuums on steroids.
Modern sewer workers aren’t dirty grunts; they’re resourceful technicians who use computers and technologically advanced tools to keep the city’s waste out of sight and sniffing distance.
“They pay us to be problem-solvers,” Ogburn said. “People don’t think about sewers very much, but when it becomes the forefront of their problem — oh boy, watch out.”
Sewer detectives Chris Brown inspects a few hundred feet of sewer line a day from a chair in the back of a van. He runs one of the sewer line maintenance unit’s camera vans.
He lowered his camera down a manhole in the back yard of a southwest Oklahoma City home earlier this month to investigate a sewage complaint.
Dozens of gallons of grease was pumped out of the sewer line before the camera could be sent into the mess. Ogburn said someone had been dumping grease into the sewer, which creates major problems.
A high-powered drill was sent through the line first to break up the sludge. Next came a hose that sucked the grease out. The suction is powered by a $250,000 flusher vacuum truck parked in front of the house.
“When that thing starts going, it’ll suck just about anything out of there,” Ogburn said, yelling above the high-pitched whir of the pump’s motor. The pump can suck 85 gallons of sewage a minute out of pipes.
Back in the camera van, Brown is surrounded by video monitors, camera controls and computer equipment. It looks a lot like the FBI surveillance vans that turn up in most crime thriller movies.
“We’re kind of like detectives in a way,” Ogburn said.
Brown tilts a joystick forward and the camera starts trolling through the pipes. Its wheels look like mini-tank tracks.
The camera shows Brown every inch of the pipe on a video monitor in the van.
Eventually, Brown spots a hole on top of the sewer line that doesn’t belong there. He said it looked like a plumber had made a makeshift connection to the line. Crews will have to dig up the line to repair it. The back yards of two or three homes will be affected.
Brown takes pictures of the problem and logs them in a database for recordkeeping purposes in case anyone files a claim against the city.
He also stores some of his favorite pictures on the hard drive.
There’s one of a mouse crawling through the sewer, and another of a co-worker crammed into a pipe while working.
In the pipes Climbing down a manhole shaft to work in the pipes isn’t common anymore, but it was when Ogburn started his job.
“I’ve been down there more times than I can remember,” he said.
Down there, it can be dangerous.
Too much sewer gas is an instant killer. Most pipes are small, smelly and sticky.
There’s always the danger of being trapped.
“People have quit because they don’t work well in confined spaces,” Ogburn said.
And then there are the rats.
They’re no myth. It’s common for dens of the creatures to scamper around beneath the city, Ogburn said.
The big myth is the sewer crocodile.
“No such thing,” Ogburn said.
But all sorts of household items do end up in the sewer: Shoes, clothes, car parts, tires, bicycles — and bowling balls.
“Try chasing a bowling ball through a sewer pipe. It’ll drive you nuts,” Ogburn said.
Workers even found an ATV in the pipes at a city sewer water treatment plant once, a plant manager said.
Once flushed, where to? Oklahoma City’s sewer water flows to one of its four wastewater treatment plants, where it’s cleaned and released back into the environment.
About 60 million gallons of sewer water passes through the 340-acre North Canadian Wastewater Treatment Plant each day, said Rick Opat, a manager at the plant.
When it rains a lot, up to 150 million gallons a day can go through the plant’s extensive cleaning and purification process before it’s released back into the North Canadian River.
The sewage stench in many of the plant’s buildings is overwhelming.
The most nauseating air is in the belt press room, where sewage pulled from water is mashed up into solid matter and dumped into a pile outside the building. From there, it’s taken away from the plant and used as an ingredient in things such as compost and fertilizer.
Opat said sewage-based compost and fertilizer is used on farms throughout the county.
Some of the compost even ends up where this sewer journey began: At golf courses.
—–
To see more of The Oklahoman, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsok.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, The Oklahoman
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
LSE:RTS,