rubber city works with fran wilson Into the Bowels of Akron BY FRAN WILSON FOR TDS Rubber City Works is an explorative column detailing the discoveries of Fran Wilson while highlighting workers in the behind-the-scenes of local government.
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eneath the sidewalks we stroll and the roads we commute is a labyrinth of pipes that connects to our homes and businesses. These pipes collect waste and water from every toilet flushed and faucet turned on, using gravity and some engineering to push it all downhill to be processed in the Valley. And the city sewage workers that manage this system are often as unnoticed as the underground infrastructure they look after. We often don’t think about sewers until something goes very wrong. And I imagine the city tries its best to make sure you don’t think about them at all. In the back of a city truck turned mobile office, parked off East Avenue, Rob Moody adjusts his baseball cap and leans forward in his chair, the back of his neon yellow t-shirt reading “Your job could be worse” over an illustration of a sad toilet paper roll. His thumbs toggle a modified X-Box controller, moving a camera-bot 8 feet underground, then he points at a slimy, moving object lit up on the screen. A tangled mess of roots filled the monitor, and in the bottom left corner, under his index: “A worm!” His boss, Rob Driver, a TV inspection technician, leaned in and chuckled. “I’ve run across raccoons and opossums. But the craziest thing I ever saw down there was catfish. There were 20 of them down there — they were dead.”
28 | The Devil Strip
Moody backed the camera-bot up and Driver radioed to the truck down the street to clear the debris from the main line. They never saw the worm again. “So, if I gave you a microphone that went to the ear of every Akronite, what would you tell them about the sewers?” I asked Driver. “Those flushable wipes aren’t flushable.” Five days a week, three TV trucks scout around town, uncovering manholes on the street and sending a camera down to check for blockages like roots or critters or “flushable” wipes, assessing and recording anything for maintenance on either the city’s side or in the sanitary pipes leading from residences. The mains that run under our feet are smaller than you might think — some only 8-inches in diameter, depending on the type and location of the pipe. In some neighborhoods, the sanitary lines from homes mix into a combined pipe with a street’s storm water drains. On a typical day, everything captured slowly makes its way down to the Valley plant, gravity nudging it along. ‘The first rule of plumbing is that water flows downhill.’ This was a lesson taught to me growing up in a plumbing family. Turns out, gravity also saves the city a lot of money, and citizens a lot of taxes. Kudos to Mother Earth on that one. At peak storm hours, some sewage is pushed into chasmic basins around the city, temporarily storing it until the pipes are cleared or the plant can handle the load. Akron’s pipes are either clay, concrete, or fiberglass. From the camera-bot, the pink coating of the neighborhood pipe makes it look like we are in the city’s very gut. And, I guess in a way, we were.
Steven Baytos, Superintendent of Akron’s Water Reclamation Facility, hands me a neon yellow vest and a hardhat. Then, he took me on a tour of the operation he oversees. The plant is tucked away between Akron-Peninsula Road and the Cuyahoga River. Growing up in the Valley, I’d always roll up the window and plug my nose when we passed the waste plants on the way to school in the morning. Today, all I could smell was the river. Baytos opened the door to our first stop, tucked away in a dim brick building, housing the plant’s bar screens. Serving Akron and a handful of other localities, the plant typically takes in over 70 million gallons of water and waste a day, and up to four times that amount during storms and thaws. Influent — everything coming in — is run through screens, filtering out large items and unprocessable waste. My eyes scanned the mechanical claws on the screen. I saw a tampon, leaves, a dozen or so “flushable” wipes, a snail, a stick, and an empty whiskey bottle. All of this was either flushed down the toilet or found its way through the storm grates on the street. “We pull 80 tons of this per week, between the rags (clothing or “flushable” wipes) and the grit.” The superintendent leads me down a set of stairs to the dumpsters — filled to the brim with heaps of mostly unidentifiable debris. On the top of a pile in one dumpster, a red rubber kickball sits next to an empty Reddiwhip canister and a condom. He mentions that during the fall, these dumpsters fill up every 30 minutes with just leaves. “You get snakes, logs, money. One guy got lucky and found $1,500 in 100-dollar bills. And you find dolls and creepy things.” “Have you seen any bodies?” I asked.
“When you flush, it doesn’t go away.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said.
October 2021 · Vol 9 · Issue #10
Baytos guides me past the grit tanks — used to rest the influent, letting sediment and particles drop to the bottom of the basin to later be sifted out. Then, we make our way across a grated walkway over bubbling brown liquid. This is where they shoot air and “good” bacteria into the influent, cleaning it biologically. And after we pass the chemical cleaning process, the superintendent veers off into the woods. That is where the effluent — the screened, processed, and cleaned water — splashes into the Cuyahoga. The smell of the river was strong, clean. As we walk back through the grass and the gravel, Baytos tells me how there’s never an off-day for the plant, its workers rotating in and out of shifts, day and night. And they often work holidays, because, as he puts it — you can’t tell families to just stop flushing. When we stopped back outside the office, we took off our hardhats and wiped the sweat from our foreheads. The superintendent looked up for a moment, his eyes skimming the grounds of the plant — machines, sewage, and all — and shared that he wished this work and city workers like him were as appreciated as other first responders. As I drove home, it began to pour. Rainwater rushed across Maple, forming a little crooked river in the street. I couldn’t help but think how every drop of that water under my tires had a long journey ahead — and how, at some point, those drops would probably come into contact with at least one “flushable” wipe along the way. For, what else would explain why every sewer worker I met told me to stop flushing flushable wipes? Fran Wilson (they) is a West Hillian activist and a 4th generation Akronite who writes about the behind-thescenes of local government. thedevilstrip.com
