Teen just metres from death 
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Teen just metres from death
Sewer shaft flows into smaller pipe where 'there'd have been no air'
David Reevely
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
The Ottawa youth who climbed into a sanitary sewer in south Ottawa Monday night would have drowned in filth if he'd been carried just a few dozen metres farther, city engineers said yesterday.
"The pipe goes from 108 inches to 60 inches," said Dave McCartney, Ottawa's manager of wastewater and drainage services.
"There'd have been no air for him to breathe at all" in the smaller pipe.
Rescuers said 15-year-old Christopher Watt was in about a metre of fast-moving raw sewage when they found him hundreds of metres into the three-metre-wide South Ottawa collector pipe. That would have filled the smaller Green Creek collector, Mr. McCartney said.
"If it had been tonight, we'd be opening hatches looking to see where his body bobbed up," he said. "The sanitary sewers aren't supposed to carry storm water -- we try to seal them, but some (water) always gets in. With the rain we're getting, it would be running much higher in there."
If Chris hadn't been lucky, the current might have carried his body all the way to the Robert O. Pickard centre, where he would have got caught in the filters with all the other debris that makes its way into the sewers. According to Mr. McCartney, who used to be in charge of the centre, that's everything from hypodermic needles to McDonald's toys.
"Anything you flush down a toilet or put down the drain, it's in there," he said.
r. McCartney, a 25-year veteran of Ottawa's sewer system, said Christopher must have climbed over a metre-high wall before falling down a narrow connecting pipe into the big sewer.
"Yeah, they'd have been in there with flashlights," said Pat McNally, the city's director of utility services and Mr. McCartney's boss. The men sat around a table of maps and sewer diagrams in Mr. McNally's office. "He probably wouldn't have seen that there wasn't a floor to land on."
The connecting pipe isn't designed for people to climb down, Mr. McCartney said. Workers needing to get to the big pipe use other access shafts, like the ones Christopher's rescuers used. The connector pipe is designed so the flow out of two smaller pipes closer to the surface can fall into the bigger one.
The city's sewers run mostly on gravity, he said. Except for a few pumping stations, mostly near the Ottawa River, the pipes run downhill to the Pickard centre in the east end. There are no grates -- anything like that would get clogged and obstruct the flow, Mr. McCartney said -- few ladders, and not much to grab hold of, especially with the sewage rushing through the pipe in pitch blackness.
"We'd have been terrified," Mr. McCartney said as Mr. McNally nodded. "And we know what's down there and how it's laid out."
"We might have been even more scared, knowing what's down there," Mr. McNally said.
r. McCartney said workers only go into the city's sanitary sewers in groups, laden with protective equipment, safety lines and air tanks.
Raw sewage gives off enormous amounts of hydrogen sulphide, a byproduct of bacteria consuming human waste. Hydrogen sulphide is "a broad-spectrum poison," according to the American Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Among other things, it's a neurotoxin that, in high concentrations, can kill a person within a few breaths. In lower doses, it can knock people out.
"Normally, we do testing at ground level after we open a cover," Mr. McCartney said. "We don't go down a shaft that hasn't been tested and, if necessary, ventilated."
Even when that's been done, he said, pockets of gas can bubble up unexpectedly and force workers to rely on masks to breathe until they get out of the danger zone.
"The message that should go out is it's dangerous down there," Mr. McNally said.
"That obviously begs the question about securing the covers," Mr. McCartney said. "Well, if people are really determined, you can't stop them."
He said an average manhole cover weighs about 90 kilograms. Some other access hatches made of aluminum have been secured but have had their covering bars broken off so the hatches could be ripped off and sold for scrap, he said.
A bigger danger, he said, is vandals who lift square storm sewer grates off and drop them down the holes they're supposed to cover.
Every Halloween, he said, crews have to go around replacing them. Submitted on 06/14/2002
Submitted by:
ichael
Reference:
Ottawa Citizen 12-06-02
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