A whiff of nostalgia

The History Channel presented a program on one of history’s most under-appreciated technologies the other night, and I could certainly relate.

No one gives the slightest thought to what happens when they flush a toilet. The stuff disappears, and goes somewhere. Who cares where? As long as it goes.

Well, exactly. One summer, I was on a crew that worked anonymously out of a couple of white city pickup trucks to keep the stuff going. It was one of the most interesting jobs I have had, and one that very few people know anything about. Citizens in their vehicles passing by gave us the most uninterested glances, not knowing at all what we were up to.

Our work always started with a call, or calls, from an address, a street, a neighborhood. Toilets would not flush, and users demanded to know why and to have it fixed immediately. We on the sewer crew were either anonymous or guilty.

Most of the time, we found the problem with our noses. It took a manhole a few hours to fill up and overflow into the street. Calls always started coming long before that. Our strategy was to pick a point a couple of blocks away from the complaining address and idle slowly toward it, sniffing the air above each manhole as we passed over it. We batted a thousand that summer, for finding the manhole that was backing up.

Somebody would lift the lid, to make sure. Then the technique was to retreat, to the next manhole back, which we knew would be dry. A manhole is just what it says it is. It lets a man climb down into the brick-lined chamber to the bottom, where the clay sewer line is easily accessible. Seniority dictated who did what. You had to have some seniority to be the one to climb down with the hammer to break a hole in the line. The hole had to be big enough without damaging the line too much, so it would be easy to patch. Inside, the line was relatively dry.

Then out of the pickup came lengths of steel rods, strong but thin enough to be flexible. At each end the rod had what looked like a Tinker Toy cylinder. These coupled the rods together, and through each cylinder passed a hole, at right angles to the rod. Into the hole was slipped a solid steel rod, about three feet long, that was manually rotated to cause the entire length of coupled rods to turn.

Several rods were thus assembled, an auger-like device coupled to one end, and this and the rod were fed down into the manhole, inserted through the break in the line, and the auger pointed upstream, toward the blockage we knew was in the line between this manhole and the smelly one up the street. Above the manhole, the honor of rotating the rod fell to the crew’s junior member. That was me. I twisted, lengths of rod fed into the hole, and more were coupled on. Every couple of lengths, I would move the twist rod back, slip it through a new hole, and continue.

Typically, the going was easy at first, and then the auger would find the blockage. What was the blockage? Anything a citizen could find that would flush down the toilet. With the resistance, managing the twist rod became tricky. Considerable torque could build up, and if I lost my grip, the twist rod in releasing that torque could do me considerable damage. In July in West Texas, the whole process was something of a challenge.

With luck, the blockage would break in under 10 minutes. I felt the torque release, flow was restored, the manhole or manholes between us and the address emptied themselves, and all that was left was to pull the rod out of the line, which was also the junior member’s job.