Three Con Edison workers crowded around a manhole in front of a LaGuardia Airport hotel on a cloudy August day, cleaning away the dirt and debris that would likely make most people cringe. Their truck was so loud they had to wear earplugs, and the rain looked like it was about to start cascading down any minute.
“Water plays no issue with us,” Paul DiDomenico, Con Ed Operating Supervisor, assured cheerfully. “When it’s raining, you get a little wet.”
Employees of Con Ed’s Environmental Operations Department (OED) – affectionately called “The Flush” – are tasked with the dirty job that keeps the city running. They clean away the debris and sludge from manholes to make them safe and accessible for other Con Ed departments to work in, to keep the electrical infrastructure in tact.
“It gets real dirty,” said DiDomenico. “We’re dealing with all kinds of debris – solid, liquid, oil, roaches, rats … It gets pretty hairy down there sometimes.”
The OED is a 24-hour department with each crew working eight-hour shifts, cleaning out four to five manholes per shift.
On that particular August day, the crew on duty was comprised of DiDomenico; William Long operating the truck’s super size suction instrument; and Woodside resident Michael Bonanno working down in the manhole in a plastic, fire retardant body suit.
“The holes are hot to begin with, but if you get a hot summer day, like 89 degrees, inside that suit you got to be about 120. They come up, they’re saturated,” said Tino Fernandez, Field Operations Planner, who was also on scene and explained that he had spent his fair share of time cleaning out manholes like Bonanno.
Before the crew got down to business, however, they had to take readings of the oxygen and carbon monoxide levels in the hole and check for stray voltage. Next, they poured Enviro-Prep, a chemical stripper, into the dark hole to collect any traces of lead, and used their truck’s giant vacuum to suck up some of the sludge and water.
After a while, Bonanno ventured down to remove items too large to travel through the truck’s suction tube and Long retrieved the debris above ground while maneuvering the machinery. To communicate through the loud rumble of the truck’s engine, the crew used hand signals.
“You don’t need to go down [into the manhole] to get dirty,” said Long, who got some of the sludge splashed on him.
In this case, the crew removed metallic bars and loose wires, but, DiDomenico maintained, found nothing out of the ordinary for their line of work. He’s never discovered an alligator while on duty, he joked, but he has had his share of surprises in the city’s underground tunnels.
“Opened up a manhole in Brooklyn – relatively new manhole – we found a half a refrigerator along with a wall full of cockroaches and water bugs; it gets a little bizarre sometimes,” he said.
Emerging into daylight after about 20 minutes in the manhole, Bonanno, too, said that morning’s job wasn’t as bad as others he’d worked on. In some holes, he explained, even after the water was sucked out, he has had to shovel sludge as high as his knee – all of which, per protocol, is later trucked to a wastewater treatment facility.
After such clean-ups, the wastewater is filtered and discharged into the sewage system with a PCB (an environmental pollutant) count of 65 parts per trillion, and any recovered debris is tested in a lab before getting shipped off.
“Some [manholes] smell like raw sewage; this wasn’t that bad,” Bonanno said. “If it really smelled like raw sewage, we’d come back up, put soap in there, wash the hole, so whoever else was going down the hole wouldn’t have to work in that.”
In addition to servicing manholes, the OED also removes debris after trench collapses and works on environmental spill cleanups. On such jobs, which include oil spills, the crew is required to wear special suits that are more protective and less breathable than their normal clean-up gear, and thus, make the job more uncomfortable.
OED crewmembers must take yearly physicals and are routinely checked for hearing damage. They also go through 40 hours of hazard training, on the job training and learn life saving procedures like CPR & First Aid.
With more than 80,000 manholes and service boxes in Queens alone and, according to Con Ed, over 1,700 tons of solid debris removed from those holes in 2008, the OED is well aware of the dangers of their line of work.
“They are constantly being reminded of the hazards of the job,” explained Fernandez.
Yet, despite the potential dangers – not to mention the dirt and filth – of their job, DiDomenico, Long and Bonanno finish their work with smiles on their mud-splashed faces.
“I enjoy all of it, really,” Long said.
-Additional reporting by Noah Rosenberg
