Everyone’s Poop: Video 
A Charred Life 
Everyone’s Poop
“Down the drain, off the brain” is how most people think about it, but human waste—or effluent, as the professionals call it—has a lot to tell us about how we live, what we eat, and who we are.
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Partly, this is due to technological advances. At the headquarters of Austin Water Utility, an engineer technician spends eight hours a day watching recordings of the insides of sewer lines made by one of the city’s ten television inspection crews, assessing and prioritizing repair needs. Aside from the occasional camera-riding snake, lost armadillo, or rabid rat attack, the footage is unbelievably monotonous, but it is a key part of a program that has brought some order to a system that relied for years on the experience of a handful of employees who began their careers when Austin was a much smaller city.
Trying to get a handle on the vast network of underground infrastructure in a rapidly growing city like Austin is a bit like trying to master the basic code for an old piece of software like Microsoft Windows, which is so complex and has been patched and modified so many times by so many different programmers that nobody really knows exactly how it works. There are thousands of miles of lines in Austin, and new mains are constantly being added by developers building subdivisions, such that no one person or database can claim to know everything there is to know about the system. It is not uncommon for crews digging in older parts of the city, such as downtown, to come across old clay lines or brick manholes that are still in use but not on any map.
Even when maps are accurate, in such a complex system, mistakes will be made. Plumbers have been known to inadvertently tap into the storm sewer—a separate system of pipes designed to drain rainwater off roads—thereby hooking a household’s sinks, showers, and toilets right into the nearest creek. Several years ago, a plumbing contractor for a new subdivision in San Antonio connected to a system carrying partially treated water meant for irrigating medians and golf courses, thinking it was a city water main. Before the mistake was discovered, new residents had been bathing in and drinking non-potable water for weeks. Finally, a property owner complained to the city that the water didn’t taste right.
Sometimes the only indication that something has gone terribly wrong underground is when odd things—like big chunks of concrete—begin turning up at a wastewater treatment plant, the end of the line for sewers. A few years ago, a plastic liner failed in one of Austin’s largest wastewater interceptors, known as the Onion Creek Tunnel, which stretches for miles deep beneath the southern half of the city. Interceptors, which collect wastewater from thousands of mains, are like underground rivers; at peak flow hours, sewage howls through them at an alarming rate. In order to do a full inspection of a tunnel this large, crews will sometimes enter one end in a boat and float downstream to the other end. In the course of investigating the failed Onion Creek liner, inspectors discovered that a telecommunications company had unwittingly bored right through the upper portion of the seven-foot-diameter tunnel using remote-controlled digging equipment.
With the exception of a few big interceptor tunnels, however, most modern sewer lines are not large enough for people to get inside and have a look, which has historically made it extremely difficult to find out where exactly a leaking pipe has failed—and why. As one engineer put it in the March 2007 issue of the journal Underground Construction: “In 1969, we knew more about the dark side of the Moon than about the inside of small diameter sewer pipes.” The advent in the early eighties of TV inspection—including remote-controlled robotic cameras that could crawl hundreds of feet through mains—began to change that, and the business of line maintenance, formerly about sweat, hard-won experience, and a strong stomach, has now become a gadget-intensive job.
In recent years, for example, Austin Water Utility has placed dozens of electronic flow meters in pipes all across the city. The meters, sophisticated devices that measure how much wastewater is present in a pipe and how fast it is flowing, are all remotely monitored on a set of four flat screens that sit on the ample desk of an engineering associate named Robert Cameron. A typical 24-hour chart for a given flow meter looks like an EKG, with two big spikes—one around seven in the morning, when people wake up and have a morning shower and purge, and another in the evening, as supper dishes are washed and another round of bathing takes place. Cameron, who has a beer belly and keeps a can of Copenhagen always within reach, reads the charts like a doctor reads a pulse; anomalous data can point to a problem in the system. He showed me the chart for May 28, which had an unusual spike in the mid-morning. “Big storm,” he said. Heavy rains can infiltrate and overload cracked wastewater lines, causing overflows. Yet rain is also an invaluable diagnostic tool: Using the flow meters, Cameron can track infiltration during heavy rains and identify areas where repairs are needed.
A flow meter is a surprisingly reliable recorder of human behavior. An experienced wastewater engineer can look at the chart from a flow meter downstream of a football stadium and tell you when halftime occurred and whether the game was a blowout or a nail-biter that kept everyone in his or her seat until the final whistle. In a paper titled “Sewer Sociology,” engineers Kevin L. Enfinger and Patrick L. Stevens examined records from flow meters in Houston on the eve of Hurricane Rita during one of the largest—and most ineffective—evacuations in U.S. history. Nobody really knows how many people tried to leave Houston that day, but the sewers may have provided the best guess: In the neighborhood examined by Enfinger and Stevens, the flow was down 36 percent.
If there is one area of human behavior that continues to baffle wastewater engineers and operators, it is the seemingly endless variety of things people will flush down a toilet or, for the more determined utility customer, shove into a manhole. Bedsheets from a mental hospital. Rags soaked in every kind of substance you can imagine. Dead parakeets, dead hamsters, dead mice, dead pit bulls. Fish, alive or dead. Engagement rings (by accident—usually). Broken glass, cocaine, battery acid, rocks. Even shopping carts and wheelbarrows. These things are not gone forever. If they don’t get stuck in a pipe, most of them wash up on a metal bar screen in the headworks of a wastewater treatment plant, like the one at the Walnut Creek plant, in East Austin, where I stood one day last May and watched the screens being cleared by a pair of long robotic arms. Every few minutes, the arms crept up out of churning pools of murky water, hauling up loads of trash freshly scraped off the screens hidden in the rushing water below. I had to fight a powerful urge to step away from the open pools and back into the sunlight, yet at the same time, there was something weirdly fascinating about the machine’s methodical dredging, and I found myself lingering to see what would come out of the water next. It could have been anything. As it happened, the majority of the detritus consisted of two pretty mundane items: condoms and tampon applicators.
According to my guide, Raj Bhattarai, the manager of Austin Water Utility’s environmental and regulatory services division, an aversion to foul-smelling water is a product of human evolution: Over the millennia, our ancestors who learned to avoid bacteria-laden water were more likely to survive. This means that sewer workers have to learn to ignore their innate survival instincts, though most of the veterans I talked to insisted that the smell was not that bad—much more tolerable than, say, the odor of a landfill. Most people would not make such a subtle distinction, which is why the primary treatment portion of the Walnut Creek plant—that is, the smelliest part—was built entirely underground, a fairly new innovation when the plant was constructed in the late seventies.
Bhattarai, a short, balding man in his mid-fifties given to bad puns and fits of giggling, joined the utility seven years after the plant opened. He was born and raised in Nepal, where his father was a justice on the supreme court. Bhattarai was accepted to a prestigious engineering-and-science academy in India at a time when modernization was making heroes out of people who knew how to build things like highways, bridges, and dams. The most fascinating new field for Bhattarai, who grew up in a country without a single wastewater treatment plant, was sewerage. While most of the guys on the trucks I met wanted to know why I was even interested in the subject to begin with, Bhattarai launched right into a pen-and-ink diagram of how a treatment plant works and then proceeded to talk about wastewater for the next seven hours, along with many digressions into his ideas about recycling, pollution, public transportation, and bottled water, which he considers the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.
Much of my tour of the plant was spent in dimly lit, dank-smelling underground chambers filled with tiny gnats and the sound of roaring water, where I struggled to hear Bhattarai explain the automated operation of machines with names like “scum beach” and “sludge pig.” Then he led me back outdoors, to the aeration basins, where the true genius of a modern wastewater treatment plant is found. The basins are huge concrete tanks where the partially treated sewage is roiled by thousands of air diffusers. Bacteria is the primary problem wastewater engineering was created to solve, but in the tanks it is actually encouraged to grow, as part of a sort of engineering jujitsu. In a natural setting, like a stream, bacteria from raw sewage will consume the dissolved oxygen in the water molecule by molecule until there is none left and the fish start to die. Once the dissolved oxygen is gone, the bacteria begin extracting oxygen from sulfates in the stream. The water turns black and starts emitting hydrogen sulfide, which is what gives a dead body of water its unmistakable rotten-egg smell.
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