Sewer Rat

Early one cold morning last week in Albany, N. Y. three employes of the Street Department rushed to Warren & Philip Streets to hunt a leak in the city's trunkline sewer. Expertly they flipped off the manhole lid. Ten feet below, icy black water, full of awful things, surged on to the Hudson. Once this sewer had been an open creek. When it was enclosed 35 years ago, engineers, according to the custom of the times, gave it great girth for a full current.

First to descend the steel ladder to make his inspection was 33-year-old John

Debo who had left his South Pearl Street home that morning without shaving. On a damp ladder rung, his foot slipped. Down the manhole vanished his dark curly head. There was a muffled splash. . . .

Forty-five minutes later Chief Carpenter William Huerter, standing waist deep in the turbulent sewer a block below Philip Street, thought he heard faint cries. Then he saw a head bobbing toward him through the darkness. Gripping the bottom of the ladder with one hand, with the other he grabbed a man's limp body just before the filthy current swept into a 75-ft. down-drain. A rope pulled the half-conscious Debo up through the Grand Street manhole, 800 ft. from his starting point. Hospitalized, John Debo told his story:

"When my head came up, everything was black and I was being swept along, swirling and whirling about. I shouted and shouted. I grabbed at the sidewalls. They were slippery. I couldn't see them.

"I thrashed out with my arms and finally my leg caught on some kind of a projection. I held on by my leg. Minutes passed like hours. Rats were swimming and thrashing all about me. My yells sounded hollow and strange. It was bitter cold. My legs grew more and more numb. Finally I lost my hold.

"I thought then all was up. I tried frantically to keep my head above the surface. I thought crazily it was all up. And then I struck some sort of a hook in the stream with my hands. I clung to it. ...

"My whole body grew numb. I felt my frozen fingers slipping from the hold, and then I knew nothing more. . . ."

Rare are sewer accidents like John Debo's. In 1929 in Manhattan an 8-year-old boy, playing carelessly about subway construction in East 53rd Street, tumbled into a sewer flowing to the East River three blocks away. Hearing the alarm, members of the Red Wing Boat Club, famed for its corpse recoveries, scurried to the sewer outlet at 49th Street, yanked the blubbering moppet out alive as he was being poured into the river.

Prime sewer statistics: 1) it costs approximately $10,000 to lay a mile of sewer pipe; 2) in the U. S. there are more than one hundred thousand miles of sewer.

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