The Big Necessity by Rose George Read Free Book Online Page B

interceptor stormwater tunnel to run under the Thames.
    And what about New York, city of confident skyscrapers built over an increasingly fragile infrastructure? The subways started working again, a New Yorker friend tells me, “and that was it. Everyone forgot about it.”
    _______
    Â 
    The men are ready to go down the hole. I’m wearing a Tyvek suit, made from the same material that weatherproofs houses under construction. I don’t have breathing equipment, because this is a regulator chamber—a sort of sewer intersection—with a viewing platform, and we aren’t going deep. Anyway, when I asked for a turtle, I got strange looks. (Later, I discovered that “turtle” is American sewer worker vernacular for excrement.) No helmet is offered because the chamber doesn’t warrant one, though the roaches might. I don’t mind rats, but I hate roaches. Down the ladder, the team leader, a handsome ponytailed man named Steve, shines his flashlight up at the corner, where several dozen of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen immediately set about scurrying into safe darkness. Steve grins. “It’s okay, they’re not roaches. They’re waterbugs.”
    What are waterbugs?
    â€œRoaches on steroids.”
    The day before, Steve had entered a sewer he’d never been into before—not unusual, when there are six thousand miles of network—and the walls were moving. “You shine your light and they move, but if you leave them in peace, they’ll leave you alone, too.” (He always tucks his ponytail into his shirt collar in case.) The same respect goes for rats, in the main. “You’re going into their home, so you treat it with respect.” Precaution doesn’t mean indulgence, not if they’re even half the size that flushers say they are, or if they’re anything like the rats described 160 years ago to Henry Mayhew by a man from a Bermondsey granary: “Great black fellows as would frighten a lady into asterisks to see of a sudden.”
    I’d seen one rat in London’s sewers, and no asterisks were provoked. The flushers must have been disappointed, because they started on the rat tales as soon as I got out of the hole. There was the story of fearsome Jack, a flusher famed throughout London for his ability to kill with his hard hat. Keith preferred his shovel. Dave had had one run up his arm on a ladder. Happy had seen one the length of his forearm. Honest.
    The New York collections men are no different. They see rats all the time, and despite professing respect for their habitat, Kevin will oftendispatch them into the flow with a whack from a bat he carries. “They can swim, but it’s so fast, they won’t survive that.” The worst thing about rats, says Steve, “is waiting for that big wet slap on your back.”
    No, says Kevin. It’s knowing you’re being watched, but not knowing who’s watching and from where. London’s sewer rats generally run away from humans. New York’s don’t. “They come at you,” says Steve. I must look disbelieving, wondering if flushermen and fishermen exaggerate alike, because the men are indignant, and look to each other for confirmation. “Really! They’ll jump on you, no problem.” Kevin swears there’s a rat near the river who’s so fearsome, it once climbed up the manhole ladder. “And the rungs are very far apart.”
    The sewers also produce less troublesome fauna. In a tank at New York’s Ward’s Island treatment plant, twelve turtles live happily in clear water, having been rescued from the grit chambers that screen the flow before it heads under the East River to a facility in Brooklyn. A Russian worker saunters past and mutters “good soup,” but the turtles are well looked after, especially considering that soup is what they would have become if they’d gone through the gritters. The