Put Rob Smith in one of the 40,000 miles of tunnels deep below London and he
still has a good idea what is happening on the surface. If the water around
his knees runs bright red, that means he is near the abattoirs in the East
End; if there are foot-long chunks of hardened fat floating on the surface —
“like feta cheese” — he is under the restaurant hot spot of Leicester Square.
When a particular pipe gushes suddenly by his shoulder, a shopper has relieved
herself in Selfridges department store. If the water rises to his waist and
is fragranced with pine freshener, he can tell it is just after the
breakfast rush of bathroom flushings and cleanings. And if the water surges
in a terrifying whoosh to fill the tunnel, he knows it is time to get out.
There is heavy rain outside, and the marvel of engineering that is the
London sewer system is about to fail, turning the Thames into a giant public
convenience.
“We’re firefighting,” said Mr Smith, the catchment engineer for Thames Water,
whose job is to make sure that the entire system works. “The rainfall is
intense, and the system can’t cope.”
In the old days, the Thames ran with sewage and smelt awful. In 1858 — during
the “Great Stink” — it smelt so bad that MPs could not bear to sit in the
Houses of Parliament, which inspired them to ask Joseph Bazalgette to build
the first modern sewerage system in the world. It saved the city from
cholera and allowed London to become great.
If Bazalgette was around to inspect his tunnels with Mr Smith — as I did this
week — he would be deeply saddened. The overflow pipes that he built to be
used in emergencies now disgorge raw sewage into the Thames every week. This
sewage does not sweep out to sea, but instead bobs 10 miles (16km) back and
forth with the tide, recreating what Disraeli then called “a Stygian pool,
reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
On Thursday the Government announced that a £2 billion tunnel would be built
to deal with the problem. But, as The Times descended into the gloom, it
emerged that the failure is not just with the system, it is with us. We are
not, as the Victorians were, grateful for our sewers. We abuse them,
thinking that someone else will always clean up our mess.
“We live in an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ society,” Mr Smith said. “It is
horrendous, because the potential for flooding is colossal. This system was
built really, really well by Bazalgette, but it does not take too many
idiots for it all to go.”
Mr Smith looks in good health, not like a man who has spent much of his 58
years underground. His free time is spent sailing. “I love to get out in the
fresh air,” he says.
We meet at one of the sewerage command centres in East London, but before we
start we must get dressed: hip-high waders, a helmet, a boiler suit,
emergency breathing apparatus and a harness. A harness? “If you fall over,
you’ll be too slippery to pull out,” Mr Smith said.
When the manhole is unscrewed, the whiff is not too bad, better than many a
bachelor’s bathroom. “That’s because it’s posh poo,” joked one of Mr Smith’s
team of flushers, for this is affluent effluent from Hampstead. In fact the
sewers do not stink, so diluted are they with water from baths, washing
machines, industry and rain.
After I have climbed down a long, steel ladder, the tunnel ahead is utterly
black. Mr Smith shines his torch downwards, to reveal that the puddle around
our boots is moving, seething with tiny shrimp-like creatures.
Moving farther along this quiet overflow tunnel, boots sink a few inches lower
into unspeakable sludge. This is when the sewer becomes an audio experience:
unable to see anything in the darkness you hear only the booming of a second
sewer overhead and the sloshing of each unsteady step.
When he stops, briefly, we can admire the glistening brickwork from
Bazalgette’s day, the domed roofs made neat by proud craftsmen. Mr Smith is
infuriated by thrill-seekers who have begun to break into the sewers: their
risk of drowning, either in heavy rain or when the flow is diverted, is
great. Some were arrested when they trespassed into the high-security sewers
under Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, which
are alarmed and guarded.
“I made that mistake myself when I started out. I went to those tunnels
without knowing and found myself staring at the barrel of a gun,” he says.
Intruders are usually rats, and goldfish and terrapins survive “for a time”,
he said, but stories of mutant aligators are a myth. His scariest discovery
was of a live hand grenade, which he threw from a manhole on to wasteland.
The greatest fear of sewer workers is fat, which is poured hot and liquid down
the sink but, on hitting cold water, solidifies and floats on the surface.
When the sewer level rises, the fat sticks to the tunnel roof. Over time,
the sewer clogs and it is eventually blocked shut. If you imagine the sewers
as London’s arteries, fat causes the heart attack. And, as Mr Smith puts it,
“the sewers keep fatting up” with more restaurants, more negligence. “I love
my job, I get a lot of job satisfaction, but I don’t think I’d be up for
starting out now, with the fat,” he said.
Once flushers had to clear a 150ft (45m) slug of hardened fat from under
Leicester Square, using pickaxes. It took them eight weeks. “It has a smell
all its own, this wall of rotting fat, generating heat and midge flies. Then
mix it up with sewage, contraceptives, nappies, it turns your stomach.”
Despite this, the flushers generally do the job for life, for the camaraderie
and adventure. Mr Smith had worked previously in mine tunnelling, but boys
do grow up dreaming of working in the sewers: of this year’s intake of 12
trainees, three are sons of flushers. They must learn a parallel map of
London, with tunnels named after the roads above, underground rivers, or
just with a romantic whim: Pall Mall, Opera, Savoy.
You also notice the toilet paper. Is that not meant to dissolve? “It should
do, but we hate Double Velvet,” said Mr Smith. “Or those new wet-wipe
things. You might as well put a sleeping bag down.”
Human waste is burnt, as a renewable electricity source, but everything else,
including cotton buds and nappies, has to be fished out, laundered, and sent
to the rubbish tip, where it should have gone in the first place.
Sir Joseph thought that his life-saving sewers would get rid of waste, not
bear the brunt of the chronically wasteful. In Les Misérables, Victor
Hugo describes the Parisian sewers as the “conscience of the city”. In
London, our conscience is not clean.
Tunnel vision
— London has 40,000 miles (64,500km) of sewers. The 1930s map, left,
shows their complexity. Laid end to end they would stretch twice around the
world
— 52 million cubic metres of waste water pollutes the rivers Thames and
Lee each year — enough to fill the Albert Hall 525 times
— 100 tonnes of cooking fat are dumped each year, costing £7 million to
clear
Source: Times Database
Clearing 100 tonnes of fat for £7 million each year would mean that one kg of fat has a cleaning price tag of £70 - can you confirm that figure?
Hermann Kloeti, TRUN, Switzerland