Drain Drones and Hydro-Saws: A Sewer Tour of LA’s Underground Tech

“ So , do you prefer full - engrossment or ankle - rich ? ” Not quite the response I ’d expected from Kent Carlson , the sewer and stormwater sphere operations coach for the metropolis of Los Angeles , when I call for a duty tour of the metropolis ’s raw sewer technology .

I ’d get to out to Carlson after catch some intriguing pic on hisTwitter feed , which showed bantam machines emerging from manhole , their metallic element teeth ostensibly gnawing through uncivilized tangles of roots and branches . It was some serious Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shit . Well , I mean hooey . But also , yes , there was shit .

Carlson , of course , was pull the leg of — they do n’t get journalists strap on hazmat courtship and go poop - dive ( much to my dismay ) . But his joke was strand in fact . As I ’d get along to learn , Carlson ’s squad use everything from precious , camera - equip robots to scary - looking hydro - powered circular saws so that they , too , rarely have to take the full - dousing tour of the toilet .

Attack of the drain bots

When you think of a city ’s sewer operations , you probably opine of one of these trucks draw up outside your house . Some issues sure enough require large - scale interposition , like thegiant balloonthat LADWP used to pass away the monolithic water main break at UCLA . But in many cases , as Carlson and his team were well-chosen to show me at their headquarters in the San Fernando Valley , what ’s block a sewer drainage is something comparatively tiny — a crooked PVC organ pipe , a tree ascendent , a yoke of dental plate .

“ This is how we used to clean sewers , ” says Carlson , holding up a dick that looks like a rust bayonet . “ We ’d take these and fleece them together , and the guys would climb down there and cut the roots out . ” In the retiring few decade , they graduated to the truck - sized hydrocleaners , which use potent snoot to spray jets of body of water into the drains . Now , the process is both high - tech and exact : Once they ’ve used a petite television camera to take in the blockage , they can use a customized hydropowered cock to clear it away .

Carlson ’s weapon system of aggregate - Diamond State - obstruction .

One - by - one , Carlson laid out his secret weapons for me to see , an arsenal of claws , saws , and bollock beater - like machines which can be affixed to the trucks ’ hydropowered nozzles . These are all devices that Carlson and his team have invented to solve very specific job in the LA . sewer system , each engineered to fit the diameter of LA ’s standard waste pipe ( the fair gutter drain is eight inches across-the-board ) .

Carlson is clearly a professional — he ’s been with the metropolis for 26 year and before that was a machinist in the Navy . But at this instant it felt as if I was glint inside a macabre torture bedroom .

The crew coif up a demonstration to show me a scenario that happens often in the clandestine world : a PVC pipe feeding sewerage from a home base teddy too far into the larger ceramic drainpipe under the street , do a accompaniment . This is called a “ bulge lateral pass . ” unremarkably , this would expect crews to grind up the connection , reset the stop , and replace the pipe — a dear and mussy undertaking . But not any longer .

Cleaning cloaca is all about designing the right creature for the ripe job .

Carlson ’s team started with one presentation in a clear plastic pipe : a sub - like drill which easily bored into a 2×4 . No problems there . Then it was time to fix the protruding lateral . The guys flipped on the high - powered hose that propel a twirl adamant - tipped saw down the clay drainpipe . It chewed powerful through the PVC in minutes .

That was impressive enough , but the big sewer whizz — and my ducky among them — was an endearing ( yes , I can call it adorable ) waste pipe bot that prompt me of a squat , Tonka - cycle Johnny 5 . These remote control - controlled tv camera byArieshave become the saving grace for Carlson and his crew , as they can now get a clear picture of obstruction before they determine how best to shed light on them using their array of putz . And now these methods have become standard at sewer G across the county , which has led to a decrease in spills overall .

The all - go steady eye of the sewer is as utile as he is lovely .

“ Back in the 24-hour interval , we used to take a lamp , put it down a manhole and creep down the other side and appear up there to see if we could see the lamp to cipher out what was in there , ” say Carlson , shaking his straits . Now , with the rotating , articulating lens system of this camera , they can zoom and focus anywhere in the organ pipe , picking up point as petite as flies . Or , as is more often the showcase , someone ’s abandon dentures .

Carlson has lots of nickname for his gadgets — many are TMNT - inspired — but he call up this one Ed Norton . Not the Fight Club actor ; the character Art Carney roleplay on The Honeymooners who was a New York City cloaca worker .

The automaton ’ cameras can order if something devoid or nefarious is below . Can you differentiate what ’s clog these drains ?

This GoPro - like rig for pipe and drain provide surprisingly ripe prototype quality to help with stamping ground work , but it also allows the department to document and keep record of what they find out and restore . Soon there wo n’t be a individual section of LA ’s cloaca system of rules that has n’t been crawled by Carlson ’s fleet of all - seeing robot . The full magnitude of what the crew is doing here did n’t occur to me until much later : They ’re basically designing and building their own US Army of underground drones .

A city mapped by manholes

As in most cities , LA ’s gutter were built segment by segment over many 10 by hundreds of different contractors . The city alone maintain 6,700 international nautical mile of these surreptitious mazes . “ The transferral organization is such an arena , ” say Carlson . “ Once you flush the toilet , you have to opine about how far it travels , then it ’s treated to the point that it ’s almost drinkable , and then it get out into the Santa Monica or San Pedro Bay . ” ( That does n’t even let in the storm drains , which are a completely different system of rules than the sewerage organization in LA . Many other metropolis combine them . )

So perhaps it ’s not very surprising to hear that the city is still piece together its sewerage sustainment map . Archival data is being bit by bit imported into a publically accessible on-line directory calledNavigate LA , which is managed by the Bureau of Engineering , but there are still plenty of gaps . One major part of the sewer arrangement that has not been accurately mapped is the only agency to access them : manholes ( or the more right terminus , sustentation holes ) .

uneven data collected from paper archive gives an incomplete flick of what ’s underground . The street and pavement markings used to show the location of usefulness blood line are also a secret language ; you may see the codehere .

Manholes are often track by asphalt or dirt , and are sometimes buried completely . Months or years might go by between the times that workers need to locate them , at which point it take away a magic sceptre - like tool you undulate over an area like a metallic element detector to endeavor to find them . But sometimes when workers get get a call , they ’ll cease up digging up a backyard just to get into the sewer itself .

Carlson has been turn to digitize this vital entropy . He equipped his workers with a GPS app for their phones that allows them to geotag manholes when they ’re out in the field of operations . So if they locate and tag one once , from then on it will always be in the system .

Carlson pulls open a manhole . It really does n’t sense at all inside .

The entire system is now centered around these geocoded manhole , with each manhole assigned a particular number based on its location . So Carlson can deploy hand truck and other workers based not on a street or an address , but on the manhole that call for to be accessed . “ I can see where our vehicles are at all times , ” he sound out . “ Say , for instance , we fuck off a sewerage call in front of your house , I could get the closest truck to get to your house so we do n’t have any downtime . ”

The oldest continuously - maneuver sewerage in LA , ramp up beneath Main Street in 1885 . Yes , those are roach .

Using Carlson ’s arrangement , we hop-skip in the truck and voyage to a street in Chinatown , where he desire to show me something peculiar . Thanks to the way they ’ve been digitizing and documenting entropy , he ’s been able to do some inquiry , and he ’s deduced that this is the oldest dynamic gutter in LA . It was built in 1885 , back when the recent in sewer innovation was a duncish brick liner . It looks positively old-fashioned , the combining weight of cobblestones on a street . Carlson says much of the city is still operating with base that ’s nearly this old .

Replacing aging sewer lines

The Chinatown brick tunnel might be the oldest operating cloaca , but it ’s not the Old gutter Carlson ’s discovered . On the other side of the river , in a Cypress Park yard , are huge cementum arches wrapped in rebar . These are crossing - sections of a sewer recently removed from a South LA line , which potential day of the month to the 1850s . As you could see , they ’re still pretty much functional . Even when these were taken out to be replace with plastic versions , the ceramic - lined tunnels were still in pretty good shape compare to some newer ones , says Carlson .

Carlson points out the ceramic tiles that used to line toilet . They even glass over them .

compensate or replace a sewer transmission line is already an arduous chore . But then total to that the alone challenge confronting LA : There are 88 separate cities here , all with vary approaches to sewer water . Some have their own sewer districts , some contract with the county . Carlson ’s team has to make as the centripetal force between them all . “ Sometimes there ’s a lot of finger - pointing about the origin of the spillage , ” says Carlson . “ We endeavor to reckon out where it add up from , but usually we just grapple the closure . ”

Workers installing sewers in the former 1800s .

What ’s remarkable about the land of L.A ’s sewer is that they ’ve manage to stay put relatively intact in such a seismically active area . Obviously the pipes set up in 1885 and before have survived several earthquakes , but that does n’t mean they ’re invincible . The city ’s subway system still has n’t fully reclaim from the 1996 Northridge earthquake , says Carlson . “ It really set us back and it really cost a circle . ”

And there ’s a looming instinctive catastrophe that might play mayhem on the sewer system , although much more slowly : the drouth . If tree are n’t scram the wet they postulate , they ’ll produce roots lower into the soil to stress to find water , which can interfere with drains and pipes .

As close as I ’d get to full - immersion . The older tile and cementum furrow are gradually being replace with these fictile shells made in the Middle East .

But the most frequent problem is not a catastrophic prostration of substructure — rather , it ’s what multitude put down the sewers , not realizing that it has a prejudicious effect . Most people do n’t believe that everything in a sewer that is n’t homo - generated or paper need to be bump off and transported to a landfill .

“ The more thing that are put down it , the more hands and energy it takes to distil it , ” read Carlson . In fact there ’s one affair in special he would like to tell Angelenos to stop redden : “ The big matter we notice is these disposable wipes . They do n’t come apart down . Sometimes we pull out these tabloid masses that are like basketball - sized . ”

A skunkworks for stink

One of the biggest government issue in managing a sewer organisation is the part you ca n’t see at all : forestall odors . Not far from where I walked through a slice of old cloaca is a neighborhood on the LA River called Frogtown , where Carlson ’s squad has set up a research lab for test how cloaca rate of flow make its way through pipes and drains while emitting the least amount of malodor potential .

There ’s a difference between inconvenient stink and dangerous fetor . When Carlson has to direct worker below ground , they have to try out to check that the air travel is safe to breathe . “ We put in what we call a“sniffer”—an atmosphere tester that will test for depressed O , atomic number 1 sulfite , and other dangerous gas , ” he says . “ If everything ’s hunky-dory we ’ll hoist them down . ”

Giant tubes of all shapes and size of it are designed for hydrological experiments .

But here , it ’s just the innocent feeling that come wafting up from the sidewalk on a hot summer day that they ’re attempting to check . What hydrologists and other engineers are seek to study is how to direct the “ flow ” ( a dainty way to say pee and poo ) in a way that will keep it moving fleetly but also diminish its scent . So they build these massive prototypes of drain and pipes using their knowledge of fluid car-mechanic to guarantee that the sewage is n’t being shove around too much — that hullabaloo is what creates the distasteful smells .

quiz tubes looking like a gargantuan habitat for gerbil and a cartoonish pipage organ .

Here they can experiment with material as well as the design of pipes to encounter out what work expert to stifle smells . remains pipes with condom gasket are still the winners for most division of the city , although polyvinyl chloride needs to be used in flaxen , coastal soils that are prone to shifting . Concrete , while perdurable , can be compromise by H sulfite gas pedal ( the stuff that smells like rotten bollock ) .

I wander the workshop in awe . Sheltered under the corrugated plastic ceiling are massive Rube Goldberg - like gismo cobbled together from scraps of wood and buck , some of them two story marvelous . The clear Plexiglass cylinder straggle through the infinite makes it feel like a pneumatic tube organisation , except for the fact that some of the army tank are filled with weewee . On a ledge are gobs of sockets and joint , as well as a KitchenAid mixer ( which apparently is swell for mixing up little batches of cement ) . All this tinker just to keep our cities smelling fresh .

A tangle of pipe render water and “ rate of flow ” are quick to be accessed for simulations .

My peep under the manhole was fill with such eye - opening moments . It ’s bad when your job is to help keep a hulking infrastructural system of rules as inconspicuous as potential , and Carlson and his section do n’t get a whole lot of credit . “ We ’re not LAPD , we ’re not LAFD , we ’re not LADWP , we ’re not scrap accumulation . We ’re out of sight , out of idea , and the only metre people mean about us is when their toilet does n’t level , ” he says . “ We just keep the water moving , but a slew of people do n’t realize the engineering it takes . ”

I ’ve now gained a new perceptiveness for where my own “ flow ” goes . I find myself mentally indexing manholes and reading the spray - painted utility - discover letter on the street , looking for clew of the sewer parentage that runs beneath . Somewhere below , Carlson and his United States Army of waste pipe bot are check that that my sewerage experience is limited to an opt - in tour of duty . And all I have to do is flush my toilet .

Carlson isanswering your questionson Tuesday , September 2 at 4:00 p.m. EST .

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