From Dart: sewage worker ["It's a rush"]

It's a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled out and wasted off, looped back, macerated, digested, clarified and returned to the river. I'm used to the idea. I fork the screenings out—a stink-mass of loopaper and whathaveyou, rags, cotton buds, you name it. I measure the intake through a flume and if there's too much, I waste it off down the stormflow, it's not my problem. 

When you think of all the milk we get from Unigate, fats and proteins and detergents foaming up and the rain and all the public sewers pumping in all day, it's like a prisoner up to his neck in water in a cell with only a hand-pump to keep himself conscious, the whole place is always on the point of going under. 

So we only treat the primary flow, we keep it moving up these screws, we get the solids settled out and then push the activated sludge back through. Not much I can do. 

I walk on metal grilles above smelly water, I climb the ladder, I stand on a bridge above a brown lagoon, little flocs of sludge and clarified liquor spilling over the edge of the outer circle. The bridge is turning very slowly, sweeping the spill-off round and I'm thinking illicit sneaking thoughts—no one can see me up here, just me and machinery and tiny organisms. 

I'm in charge as far as Dartmoor, the metabolism of the whole South West, starting with clouds and flushing down through buildings and bodies into this underground grid of pipes, all ending up with me up here on my bridge—a flare of methane burning off blue at one end of the works and a culvert of clean water discharging out the other end, twenty BOD, nine ammonia, all the time, as and when