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.

by Nate Blakeslee

Illustration by Linda Helton

They say that shit runs downhill. This is commonly understood to mean that the world is an unfair place, except among those few people who actually work with the substance, for whom it is considered something of an article of faith. This is because municipal sewerage systems are powered almost entirely by gravity, which means that when working properly, they move millions of gallons of sewage a day across considerable distances with only a minimum expenditure of energy, a feat of efficiency virtually unparalleled in the annals of engineering. When sewage stops running downhill, as it inevitably does from time to time, very bad things indeed can happen, as they did on Pecan Springs Road, in the Austin neighborhood known as Windsor Park, one morning last September.

I was spending the day with an Austin Water Utility emergency-response crew when dispatch got a call from a woman reporting that two rooms of her house were flooded with sewage. Our crew consisted of a TV truck, piloted by a twenty-year line-maintenance veteran named David Eller, and a flusher truck, driven by another longtime utility employee, named Dale Crocker. At the house, Eller, who wears wraparound sunglasses and looks a little like the country singer Dwight Yoakam, unspooled a thick red cable from the back of his truck. On the end of the cable was a camera about the size of a roll of quarters, which Crocker shoved down into a PVC clean-out pipe near the curb in the front yard. The woman leaned on a walker in her driveway, looking worried.

The pipe came into view on a screen mounted near the truck’s rear doors. The walls of the pipe were colored a pleasing aquamarine, and the inside looked remarkably clean as the camera moved slowly forward, scudding along through the trickle of water on the bottom of the pipe. After only a few feet, however, something white and fibrous appeared at the top of the screen. “Tree roots at three feet,” Eller announced.

Trees are the bane of all underground infrastructure, but they are particularly hard on wastewater systems. Tree roots end in tiny tendrils, which act as notoriously efficient water diviners, constantly probing and searching for moisture under the earth. If a pipe has even a pinhole leak, which often occurs at joints, the tree will find it and begin slowly working its way into the opening. Root tendrils no more rigid than a stalk of celery can penetrate concrete or iron, in a sort of slow-motion version of a tornado slamming a two-by-four through a car door. There is no way to stop this, though many ideas have come and gone, including pipelines that exude their own herbicide. Once inside a pipe, roots flourish in the moisture-rich environment, eventually forming dense root-balls through which solids cannot pass.

In this case, the culprit was almost certainly a fifty-foot cottonwood in the middle of the front yard. A few feet past the root-ball, Eller detected a wastewater-filled sag in the line, probably caused by roots from the same tree pressing down on the top of the pipe. The root-ball was the most likely cause of the clog, but a sagging pipe can spell trouble down the road for a property owner—or PO, as the line crews call them—if it gets worse and causes the line to break. Still, Eller assured me that the woman had gotten off easy. Clogs in sewer mains—the larger lines that run under the street collecting sewage from the smaller service laterals that connect to homes—can be much worse. If you happen to live just upstream of the spot where the main in your street is clogged, what backs up in your toilet is not just your own sewage but your neighbors’ too. Like all flooding victims, the lower you are in the topography of your neighborhood, the worse you get it. Eller recalled one emergency he went out on last year in East Austin. “This guy indicated to me that shit water was shooting out of his toilet with five hundred roaches coming out of it,” he said, outlining with his arms an imaginary column of brown water and roaches.

“Worst I ever saw was off of Salton Drive,” Eller continued. In that incident, a main had been completely eaten out by hydrogen sulfide, an acidic gas that collects in pipes that are not flowing well. Over time, hydrogen sulfide can turn concrete into a porridge-like mush. Another component of sewer gas, methane, can be poisonous to breathe at high-enough concentrations. Last July, a farmer in Virginia walked down into a holding pit of liquefied cow manure and hit an invisible pocket of methane so concentrated that he instantly dropped dead. When his wife and two daughters went down to retrieve him, they dropped dead too. On Salton Drive, the gas had been so potent that the main was simply gone. “Must have flooded sixteen homes,” Eller recalled. “I mean, it was a foot up on the sides of their houses. The street was just full of water, women’s products floatin’ everywhere. The POs were freakin’ out.”

A flusher truck carries an array of obstruction-busting nozzles, each designed for a different type of blockage and a different size of pipe. The larger ones are two feet long and weigh upward of thirty pounds. Crocker showed me his collection of smaller, service-lateral-size nozzles, stainless-steel implements of destruction that he kept in a padded case reminiscent of something Q would hand 007 in the first act of a Bond movie. For this job Crocker chose a Warthog, a shiny four-inch-long device shaped like a fifties pencil sharpener. The Warthog screws onto the end of a hose and spins around like crazy when you send water through it, cutting up roots and whatever else might get in its way. If it were not inside the pipe when you turned on the water, the Warthog would whip around like one of those front-yard water toys kids used to play with, except that if it hit you, it would kill you.

Crocker snaked the Warthog down into the clean-out on the end of a long black hose and began blasting the pipe with water from the flusher’s giant tank. After a few minutes, he reinserted the camera to see what he had accomplished. The PO hobbled over to the rear of the truck to look at the monitor. Awakened by the rumbling of the flusher truck, a neighbor who worked nights came out in his shorts and bare feet to see what was going on. He was about thirty years old and had a long ponytail and several days’ worth of stubble on his jaw. Presently, our small audience was joined by a woman in a nicely tailored skirt and an older man, who had been walking the block. We all stood around the back of the truck, watching transfixed as the camera snaked along through the aquamarine PVC pipe, which was now mostly dry and clear of roots. “This is like a colonoscopy,” the older man said. When the camera came once again to the sag, still partially filled with water, there was a perversely satisfied “Hmm” from the audience, as though we had just watched Bob Vila find a termite pile on This Old House.

“Plumbing is some freaky shit,” the ponytailed neighbor said, and everyone nodded.

Sewerage is the sine qua non of urban life. London, the first megacity, might not have survived the nineteenth century had a medical researcher named John Snow not correctly theorized that recurring cholera epidemics were caused not, as was commonly believed, by the inescapable smell of raw sewage that plagued every corner of the city but by the bacteria leaking from countless overflowing cesspools into wells and streams used for drinking water. London eventually replaced its army of shovel-toting cesspool muckers with a citywide sewer system, which drastically reduced the incidence of disease and became known throughout the Western world as one of the marvels of the Industrial Age, though it was in reality not much more advanced than the system devised by the Romans more than two thousand years earlier. Today, at least three million deaths worldwide are caused each year by waterborne germs—mostly attributable to poor sewage disposal—and access to clean water remains a bellwether of development. In the neighborhoods of Baghdad, the presence of raw sewage in the streets four years after the American invasion, at least as much as rolling blackouts and roadside bombs, has come to symbolize the power of the insurgency and the ineffectiveness of reconstruction efforts.

If sewerage is the cornerstone of civilization, then ours is a civilization in decline. Decades of neglect and postponed maintenance have left an estimated $500 billion in needed repairs and upgrades to wastewater pipelines and treatment plants nationwide. Overflows, and illnesses related to overflows, are becoming increasingly common, yet there remains a general reluctance by municipal governments to raise taxes to invest in something that most residents take for granted. Decaying roads and bridges are symptoms of the same problem, though potholes are more visible to taxpayers than leaking pipes, and total failures—like the bridge disaster in Minneapolis—are much more spectacular. The problem is exacerbated in boomtowns like Austin, which has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the country since the late eighties. In 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the City of Austin to take drastic measures after a series of overflows, the worst of which was a massive spill into a stream called Brushy Creek that sickened 1,400 residents in suburban northwest Austin. The city is now in the fourth year of an eight-year, $350 million overhaul of its pipelines and by all accounts has already substantially reduced the number of overflows. When Eller first started working on an emergency crew two years ago, he was getting up to fifteen calls a day. Now the crews generally get fewer than half that number.

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