We get creepy with a loathed sewer creature
I got my start researching the history of Philadelphia’s water and sewer systems back in 1997, when I walked through a sewer in Northeast Philadelphia with Water Department staff and wrote about it for the now-defunct Philadelphia City Paper.
In honor of the last Friday the 13th of 2019, I thought something creepy might be a good flashback, so I’ve paraphrased the section of that article that focuses on the least-favorite creature of many city dwellers: rats!
Flashing my light up a foot-wide sewer pipe I surprised a small rat, which disappeared so quickly that nobody else saw it.
This was the only rat we saw on our walk, but I was assured that they abound in other areas underground. At the time, Sewer Maintenance Crew Chief William Stewart told me that some areas can be plagued by many rats residing in the pipes:
“You don’t even want to go in the sewers down there,” he warned.
Sewer inspector Isaiah Austin said that sewers in newer neighborhoods, where the houses have in-sink trash disposal systems, attract more rats because of the ground-up food.
“And they don’t even have to chew,” joked industrial waste inspector Joe Cerrone.
“Rats are good swimmers, pretty good swimmers,” said sewer maintenance chief Richard Goode. “They don’t like to swim, but they can. And they can climb anything.”
Charles Johnson, another crew chief with more than 20 years’ experience in sewer work, said rats are basically shy creatures that run away when they’re discovered.
“The only time a rat might not run,” he said, “is when a worker crawling in a tight pipe gets between a mother rat and her nest. In that case, we tell them they should duck their head and let the rat run right over your back.”
Goode told a story about kneeling at the bottom of a manhole with a co-worker, facing down a rat that, for some reason, refused to run away. They whistled, threw stones, but the rat wouldn’t budge. Then, they happened to look behind them and discovered they were almost sitting on the rat’s nest.
“My foot was in one of the burrows,” he said. “It was this mound of dirt at the dead-end of the sewer, and there must have been about 25 rats.”
That particular sewer inspection was never completed. “We hauled %#@ out of there!” Goode said.
The biggest rat Goode ever saw was about 10 inches long, without the tail, and Stewart claimed to have seen rats that were “as big as a cat.” But as Cerrone observed, “Rats always look a lot bigger when they’re alive than when they’re dead.”
For more on rats, read this post from Justin Martin.