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Dirty Work: Sewer Cleaners
Under Cincinnati, Workers Keep the Waste Flowing
 Listen to Jack Speer's report.
 Back to the Dirty Work series
The view inside a sewage interceptor -- a large underground pipe that provides the first step in the filtering process as raw sewage heads for treatment.
Photo: Melissa Gray, NPR News
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Aug. 29, 2002 -- Americans use roughly 450 billion gallons of water a day: 4.8 billion gallons just for flushing toilets, and the rest for bathing, washing or drinking. All that water eventually winds up in the sewers -- and that's where NPR's Jack Speer went, to meet the workers who keep the nation's waste flowing to treatment plants.
Speer and Morning Edition Associate Producer Melissa Gray visited Cincinnati's sewers as part of the show's series on "dirty work."
Americans' perception of sewer workers, Speer says, "is largely defined by one 1950s-era television show" -- The Honeymooners, in which comedians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney played bus driver Ralph Kramden and his pal Ed Norton, a sewer worker. Real-life sewer workers "aren't above joking about the work they do," says Speer -- but they contend their lives are nothing like a TV sit-com.
In hip waders, Speer and sewer worker Henry Chapman descend a 25-foot ladder into Cincinnati's aging sewer system. They walk into the mouth of a 20-foot-diameter pipe, part of what's known as a collection site, that spews what Speer calls "an unsavory mix of storm water runoff and brown sewage."
These collection sites -- deep concrete containers where water flows through large grates -- are found throughout the 3,000 miles of pipe that carry waste to seven Cincinnati sewage treatment plants. And periodically, sewer workers say, the sites have to be cleared of sticks and debris that could keep the waste from flowing freely on to treatment. Jack Murray, whose job is to clean the grates at the end of the pipes, says over the years he's found some pretty interesting things there: "bicycles, tires, once in a while a door floating through…"
As distasteful as outsiders might find their jobs, Chapman, Murray and other Cincinnati sewer workers take satisfaction from the results of their cleanup efforts, Speer says. "Rather than doing a dirty job few people would want," he says, "they look at themselves as environmentalists improving the quality of peoples' lives."
Other Resources
• Visit the Web site of the Metropolitan Sewer district of Greater Cincinnati.
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