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The Tao of poo
From a South End toilet to Massachusetts Bay, a writer follows his bodily waste through a long, tumultuous journey
BY CHRIS WRIGHT


It’s unlikely that anyone will ever make the cover of Fortune magazine for revolutionizing the way we go to the bathroom. Toilets simply do not lend themselves to that sort of innovation. Indeed, in the 4500 years since flush toilets were invented — supposedly by the people of Lothal, India — the technology has only undergone some very minor tinkering. Then, as now, the principle behind flush toilets was simple: a certain amount of water is evacuated into a bowl with enough force to dislodge whatever matter has been deposited there. The main variable, one which has caused lively debate over the years, is how much water is needed to complete the job.

In the 1950s, American toilets used a lavish seven gallons of water for every flush. Since then, however, government regulations have gradually reduced GPF (gallons per flush) to more conservation-friendly levels, culminating in the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which slashed the nation’s GPF to a measly 1.6 gallons. This mandate, while noble in its intent, led to the commonly heard gripe that new toilets had to be flushed two or, for really big jobs, three times. "It took a while to catch up, to create the technology to get a toilet to flush well," says Robert Reid, a plumber at Beacon Hill Plumbing & Heating. "We had to install a lot of toilets and replace them at our own cost."

One of the ways the industry sought to address these sticking points was by introducing so-called pressure-assisted toilets, in which water is either shot from a pressurized pipe or air is used to thrust water out of a tank with more force than gravity would allow. Not all of this newfangled technology has been, as it were, flush with success. Reid, for one, complains about the Rube Goldberg–like machinations that some modern toilets employ to perform the simple task of flooding a bowl with water. "They’re exciting to watch, but way too over-designed," he says. "I like the high tanks, basic Newtonian physics. And you get a good noise when you flush."

Reid would like my toilet. Mine is a very basic, very effective tank-behind-the-bowl model. I press the handle, the stuff goes away. Like most people, I’ve never really considered what happens to my stuff after it’s gone. There are some things, after all, best left unexplored. And yet, like it or not, metro-Boston sewage has recently become a subject of national and even international attention. For one thing, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) has, over the last decade or so, splashed out close to $4 billion to prevent our crap from bobbing about in the Boston Harbor. The MWRA’s Deer Island Treatment Plant, which looks like something out of a George Lucas film, attracts visitors from all over the world. But what does this ultramodern — dare I say glamorous — facility actually do?

Recently, I set out to trace the journey my own bodily waste makes from the moment it whooshes out of view until the moment it is deposited onto the floor of Massachusetts Bay. What I found called to mind the kinetic sculpture at the Museum of Science, in which a series of balls are conveyed up and down, back and forth, ringing bells and plonking and plinking along the way. As it turns out, the way we dispose of our sewage in Boston is a matter of dazzling complexity and invention. It is also, not surprisingly, often quite ugly. But we don’t get to see that part. Not, that is, unless we take the time to look into it.

I live on the fourth floor of an apartment building on Union Park, in the South End. It is here that my waste starts its journey, and it is here that the complications begin. I’d always imagined, for instance, that when I flush my toilet, the whole mess simply plops straight down and, with a splat and a gurgle, disappears into a sewer. Nope. The thing is, left to their own devices, solids and water travel at different speeds. So, to keep the sewer-y stew that has been evacuated from my toilet cohesive, the pipes that carry it snake back and forth, at a pitch of between an eighth- and a quarter-inch per foot. Meanwhile, each bend is fitted with a special joint that, in theory, allows for flexibility but not leakage.

Tying into these zigzagging pipes every few feet is a smaller ventilation pipe, which ensures that unpleasant and potentially dangerous gases do not find their way into my apartment, and prevents a vacuum from forming in the waste pipe, which would create drag, causing blockages, back-ups, and the unthinkable reflux back to the point of origin. Finally, having been properly vented and kept moving at the right velocity, the churning mixture sloshes from a four-inch iron pipe into a 15-inch clay sewer pipe located seven and a half feet below the ground, where it begins its journey in earnest.

If you were to cut away a cross section of an average city neighborhood, you would see a convolution of piping, a sprawling vascular mesh that hums with constant motion. In Boston, 100 million gallons of wastewater a day cascade through more than 1500 miles of sewers. At first, these pipes are small, a matter of inches in diameter. But as the waste continues on its journey, as more and more pipes containing more and more sewage join the fray, the channels get increasingly larger, culminating in "interceptor pipes," which are 20 feet or more in diameter. Meanwhile, to allow gravity to do its job, all these pipes slope downward, sinking deeper and deeper into the earth as they go.

To find out where my own humble waste fits into all this, I visit the headquarters of the Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC), a large, impeccably modern building in the South End, to meet with John Sullivan, the BWSC’s chief engineer. Sullivan, a dry-humored, no-nonsense 32-year veteran of the sewer business (his father and grandfather were in sewers, too), is regarded as one of the best engineers of his kind in the country. Which, given the system over which he presides, is a good thing.

By American standards, Boston’s sewer system, which was constructed in 1884, is extremely old. More to the point, until recently it looked and acted its age. Until the 1970s, the system had fallen under the auspices of the Metropolitan District Commission, which was often too busy shifting snow or maintaining parks to worry about what was going on far below the city streets. As a result, Boston’s aging sewer infrastructure had begun, as Sullivan puts it, to "crumble." By 1977, things had gotten so bad that a new agency was formed — the BWSC — to pick up the pieces, or at least to prevent things from getting to the point where pieces would need picking up.

The task the agency faced was daunting. Though concrete piping has become more widespread in Boston, there are still hundreds of miles of the original, notoriously leak-prone brick-and-mortar sewers running through the city. By 2002, the BWSC had poked its specially designed TV cameras through 373 miles of this piping, repairing 21 miles that were fixable and replacing 35 miles that weren’t. It has also separated 41 miles of combined sewers — overflow pipes that carry both rain water and wastewater — dramatically curtailing the amount of raw sewage that is released into local waterways during heavy rainfall, or what those in the business call "storm events."

Sullivan, who is not given to overstatement, describes the ongoing project to fix and maintain Boston’s sewers as "a lot of work." It is, in fact, a massive, never-ending enterprise, akin to trying to stack a million ping-pong balls during a gale. To put things into perspective: access to Boston’s sewer system is provided by manholes dotted throughout the city — at the last count, there were 44,493 of them. The BWSC has about 575 employees in total; even if every last employee were to don coveralls and poke their heads into these manholes tomorrow, it would take 10 years just to diagnose what kinds of problems the system has.

Still, it soon becomes apparent that Sullivan enjoys grappling with the multifaceted, multidimensional puzzle before him. Within an hour of my arrival at his office, he has spread a series of large blueprints out on a conference table, which he quickly begins marking with Xs and scribbled figures. "I wish you lived somewhere else," he says, gazing down at the blueprint. "Your neighborhood is the most complicated of the complicated." He traces a line with his finger. "This is an unusually large pipe," he says, sounding as if had just spotted a rare and wonderful species of bird. Clearly, Sullivan loves this stuff.

In sewage terms, I do indeed live in a tricky area. As a local engineer moaned in a technical paper dating back to 1915, "[T]his district, with its peculiar arrangement and grading of streets, alleys, yards and basements, could hardly have been planned more effectively to produce trouble." The main problem is that the South End is situated in a swampy basin. If gravity had its way, the entire neighborhood would quickly turn into a large, dirty pond. So, to forestall reversion to its natural state, the South End is constantly being drained by a pumping station — basically an enormous sump pump — which happens to be located at the end of my street.

Even before it gets to the Union Park pumping station, my waste goes through an almost comical sequence of twists and turns. First, it leaves my building through the rear, emptying into a pipe in an alleyway. It then takes a left onto Tremont Street, followed by another left back onto Union Park. It crosses Washington Street and Harrison Avenue, then dog-legs right and left at the pumping station, where, depending on the weather conditions, it takes either a left or a right.

During severe "storm events," when the city’s sewers simply can’t handle the volume flowing through them, the waste from my neighborhood pours into a massive overflow pipe, takes a left on Frontage Road, and travels for about two miles to the Fort Point Channel, where it is unceremoniously dumped into the ocean, as stinky and toxic as it was when it left our toilets. There are, however, efforts under way to put a stop to this. As part of its ongoing project to eliminate raw-sewage overflow by 2008, the MWRA is in the process of building an adjunct to the Union Park pumping station, a $40 million miniature treatment plant that will filter and disinfect the waste before it is flushed into the channel.

But on a normal day, my waste swings right on Frontage Road, where it is deposited into a 20-foot interceptor pipe and whisked away in a thundering torrent of crap. Three miles and two hours later, the stuff I deposited into my toilet bowl has meandered through South Boston and arrived at a processing plant called a headworks — the first stop in the MWRA’s treatment process. It is here, for the first time since it left my house, that the stuff comes out into the open. It is not, I have to say, a pretty sight.

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Issue Date: November 7 - 13, 2003
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