Raking muck (and putting on a show)

There's been a lot of work in the neighborhood lately (my Maine neighborhood, that is) on the storm water intakes.

Most of them have newly stenciled warning signs with super-cute lobsters like the one you see above. (You can learn more about Casco Bay here.)

But even if everyone follows this admonition, there's still a lot of muck that gets washed down a storm drain. And not only are the drains not very large, the gunk that gets washed down them might adversely impact water quality in the bay. (They are working very hard to improve the coastal and tidal water features around here, as I learned the other day on my walk around (or, more accurately,  part-way around) the Back Cove.)

So periodically the muck gets raked out. Or, more precisely, flushed out and vacuumed up. Much to the delight of the neighborhood kids (including my little granddaughter) who watch the operation with intense interest.

the grandma and kids here had been following the truck around all morning!

On our walk the other morning, we encountered a worker who was more than happy to take a break from this (as he admitted) rather tedious job to explain the process to us and answer our questions.

What happens is that the long tubes on the front of the truck (a Vactor 2100, if you were curious) suck muck out of the sewer, helped along by high pressure water applied from a nozzle conveniently stored on the side of the vehicle.

He kindly let us look down into a partially-cleaned-out drain which I snapped on the left. If you enlarge the image you can see the lovely brickwork that makes up the walls of the drain...obviously constructed in a more craftsmanlike (and labor-intensive) era.

The morning before we had our talk with the muckraker his colleague had worked in front of our house, providing probably close to half an hour of toddler entertainment (which is really saying something!).

I had noticed that after doing the vacuuming, he re-positioned the truck and then looked for all the world like he was pumping stuff back out of the truck and into the drain via the flexible blue hose on the back. (This appendage is in the red box in the photo below, which also shows the guy shooting that high pressure water down the drain.)

So I asked our garrulous friend about that. Sure enough, something goes back down the drain every once in a while, but it's not slurried muck, as I suspected, but just water. There are apparently filters and screens inside the Vactor's tank that retain the solids while the water can go out into the bay via the drain in a relatively clean condition. 

As a matter of fact, the EPA requires that the water go back down drains in the same neighborhood where it was mucked out, I suppose to keep undesirable elements from spreading. (I admit to being not too clear about this part of the process.)

Anyway, I found this unusual operation to be as fascinating as the kids did, although from a Dirty Jobs/engineering aspect rather than just an interest in large, noisy machinery. 

Thanks for indulging my desire to share this aspect of New England utility work with you!

Back Cove at high tide, with part of the Portland skyline