Deep-Slime Divers Keep Vast and Smelly Sewers Flowing

By Mexico City
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 30, 2004; Page A18

Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/6z84w
Caption:
Carlos Barrios Orta is one of the divers who maintain Mexico City's
600-mile-long sewer system, clearing out debris so it won't back up
into streets.
Photo Credit: Photos Mary Jordan -- The Washington Post

Carlos Barrios Orta squeezed himself into his rubber diving suit,
pulled on an 18-pound helmet that made him look like an astronaut,
then lowered himself into the sewer. He disappeared into the filthy
water, which looked like some cauldron of rancid beef stew, until the
only sign of him was air bubbles breaking the surface.

"It's very, very cold," Barrios, 48, said into the radio microphone in
his diving helmet.

Above ground his partner, Julio Cesar Cu, monitored his radio
transmissions and urged him to keep talking. As long as Barrios was
still chattering away, it meant that he was okay, that his air hose
was working properly and that he hadn't been swept away to his death
by an unexpected rush of waste -- as happened to another diver some
years ago.

It was 11 a.m. in a massive drain underneath Mexico City, where the
smell of human waste and rotting trash was so strong it was hard for a
visitor not to vomit. But it didn't seem to bother Barrios, one of
four divers who maintain the 600 miles of sewers and pipes beneath the
biggest city in North America. He was just doing his job: keeping
pumps and sewers clear.

"I feel plastic bottles, wires, glass," said Barrios, his every breath
exaggerated on the radio.

In the darkness of the sewer, Barrios could see nothing. He doesn't
bother to carry a light, because it would be of no use in the thick
waters. He inched forward in his bright red suit, an airtight model
that sealed away the disease all around him, feeling his way with his
rubber gloves, listening in the darkness. He could hear the powerful,
whirring pump that pushed the flow through a six-foot-wide pipe. His
mission was to clear away the debris around it so it wouldn't back up
into city streets. Thousands of homes have been flooded in the past by
dammed-up wastewater.

"I've got it!" Barrios said as he pushed away bottles, plastic bags
and other junk he could not identify by touch. At least there were no
human bodies today, like the two he found floating by recently.

Now Barrios was singing. "I live in the water, lah-deh-dah-dum." It
was a popular children's song, "The Pretty Little Fish," and Barrios
sang it like he couldn't possibly have been happier. He loves his job.
Two years ago, he gave up a career in accounting for this -- which, he
noted, says something about accounting.

Barrios, a happy-go-lucky father of three, said none of it bothers him
-- not the smell, not the dangerous spinning pump blades, not even the
two cadavers. He never found out who they were, because they were
carried off in the flowing waters. The police were not called. The
divers, who periodically encounter bodies because sewers are popular
spots for dumping murder victims, only call police when they bring a
body to the surface.

The radio crackled again. Barrios was still working to clear the big
pump.

"I am not sure what this is," he said. "Maybe glass bottles?"

"Stay alert. Don't get cut," Cu told him.

"Okay," Barrios said. He'd been underwater 10 minutes, and Barrios
said his body had adjusted to the cold about 24 feet deep in the
60-degree water. "I'm comfortable. It's great. I feel the adrenaline."

Barrios was pumped up. No office, no pencils, no spreadsheets, no
routine. He did that for 24 years. He said he's had more fun as a
"wastewater diver" than he did in a quarter century of totaling up
stacks of numbers. And he's proud that he's providing a service for
his city, which has few resources for a more modern sewage system and
must rely on divers to keep the aging equipment humming.

His adventure, as he calls it, was at this moment leading him to large
pieces of wood floating dangerously close to the pump pushing the
waste of a city of 20 million to treatment plants. Who knows how the
lumber -- or for that matter, the plastic bags, toothpaste tubes,
shoes and other discards -- ended up here? Perhaps some poor family's
shack was washed away by heavy rains and flowed into the sewers.

Barrios snagged one beam, then another, with a hooked crowbar, putting
them in a steel cage that hauled them to the surface.

The scariest thing, Barrios said, was when his gloves felt what he
thought was a human arm. He radioed that he feared he was bringing up
a dead child. "But it turned out to be a teddy bear," he said. "It was
such a relief."

For this, Barrios earns about $480 a month. It's not much, certainly
-- his diving helmet alone cost the city $3,500 -- but it's more than
he ever made as an accountant. He has never been sick, but his wife
and children love to kid him when he comes home from a day in the
sewers, shouting, "Don't come near me!"

Barrios is a compact man, not quite 5-feet-6, with an easy smile. He
swims competitively, and dreams that when his young children finish
school, he can move to the sea, perhaps on the Gulf of Mexico, to swim
and dive in crystal-clear waters. But for the moment, he said, he's
happy to know that while there are millions of divers in the oceans,
only four have the privilege of diving in the Mexico City sewer
system.

About a half hour after he lowered himself into the water, Barrios
broke the surface. Cu and some others raised him to street level in a
steel basket. Barrios said he felt great as Cu tossed buckets of soapy
water on him to get the gunk off his diving suit. Barrios then peeled
himself out of it, and he and Cu stowed their equipment for the next
dive.

Lunchtime. Barrios said he had sure worked up an appetite down there.

He was ready for a taco.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45322-2004Aug29.html