MIND IN THE GUTTER

Just watch out for Morlocks

Sewers. They're beneath most of us and we give them virtually no thought until one backs up or city workers start tearing up the street to get at one where you have to drive. Sometimes, you'll see Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs down in a sewer. That's about it for most of us, it's an aspect of life we'd prefer not to think about.

At the same time, sewers are not just a critical part of our infrastructure dating back to Rome, but they sometimes are an example of impressive architecture and engineering. Toronto's Michael Cook took a trip through the storm drains, sewers, and waterways of Canada armed with his camera against the rats and mosquitos. The results are among other urban structure explorations on his website Vanishing Point (which at the point of this writing is down).

At the Building Blog, Cook was interviewed by Geoff Manaugh in an article laden with his photography.

BLDGBLOG: What do you actually bring with you? Do you have some kind of underground exploration kit? Full of Band-Aids and Advil?

Michael Cook: I have a pair of boots or waders, depending on the circumstances. I’ll also bring one or more headlamps, and a spotlamp, and various other lighting gear – plus a camera and a tripod. That basically sums it up.

I also have a manhole key – that’s basically just a loop of aircraft cable tied onto a bolt at one end and run through a piece of aluminum pipe that serves as a crude handle. Most of the manhole lids around here have between two and twenty square holes in them about an inch wide, and they’re reasonably light. Assuming the lid hasn’t been welded or bolted into the collar of the manhole, it’s relatively quick and painless to use this tool to pull the lid out. It’s only useful for light-weight lids, though. In Montreal, for instance, most of the covers are awkward, heavy affairs that sometimes need two people, each with their own crowbar, to dislodge safely. Real utilities workers use pickaxes – but those aren’t so easily carried in the pocket of a backpack.
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BLDGBLOG: A lot of these places look like surreal, concrete versions of all the streams and rivers that used to flow through the city. The drains are like a manmade replacement, or prosthetic landscape, that's been installed inside the old one. Does the relationship between these tunnels and the natural waterways that they've replaced interest you at all?

Michael Cook: Oh, definitely – ever since I got into this through exploring creeks.

At their root, most drains are just an abstract version of the watershed that existed before the city. It’s sort of this alternate dimension that you pass into, when you step from the aboveground creek, through the inlet, into the drain – especially once you walk out of the reach of daylight.

Even sanitary sewers often follow the paths of existing or former watersheds, because the grade of the land is already ideal for water flow – fast enough, but not so fast that it erodes the pipe prematurely – and because the floodplains are often unsuitable for other uses.

The interview and his photography excise the stench, spiderwebs, and slime involved in these explorations, and make the experience interesting, like urban spelunking. Commenters plumbed the depths of this topic:

Wow, what amzing photos of incredible places! I can't help thinking that the designers of Half Life 2 spent a lot of time looking in these very tunnels - the resemblances are truly striking!
-by Dave Morris


Ahh, great to see such a pioneer getting such great coverage. Ontario has some of the largest and most impressive drins ive seen and Mike has done an awesome job over the years finding so many of them, specially considering a lot of his traipsing has been via Torontos Public Transit.
-by siologen


It's terrific to see someone so considerate and thoughtful on what is so often presented as simply "weird." I'll definitely be checking out Vanishing Point-- the underground world isn't my cup of tea, but the ideas here are certainly worth examining further.
-by DaveX


Incredible! Images of Orson Welles running through the sewers of Vienna in The Third Man come gushing forth. It's always a wonderment to see what lies beneath us. Thank you.
-by Robbo


alistar, someone already has made a documentary about New York's mole people: Dark Days.
-by Geoff Manaugh


Hello Mike and Geoff - very nice interview, interesting topic and great photography. I had also noticed that your VP server was struggling.

One thing I might point out, as an engineer who is often involved with construction and safety - you'd be wise to invest in a small portably oxygen meter and vapor meter. Actually, in the U.S. maintenance and construction workers can't enter these structures for work without something called a "confined space entry plan" (OSHA requirement). The problem is these places aren't well-ventilated, so you can have decreased oxygen environments and noxious fumes. Probably one reason for headaches that Mike cites among some explorers.

If you are interested in your counterparts in Moscow (where there are EXTENSIVE and legendary tunnel systems, metro, stormwater, sewer, bunkers, and other) you might want to check out this posting on my blog.
-by Shedd


Cook's explorations are fascinating, and his desire to document the enormous works under the city is encouraging.

Such a project -- to trace the determinate role of often-invisible infrastructure in the shaping of urban development -- would be far more informative than the tendentious speculation about "the nature of space" or "liminality" that is unfortunately used to frame the interview. To treat storm drains as architectonic objects misses the point entirely, and is particularly irritating when the engineering and public health discourses, not to mention the often entertainingly corrupt turns of municipal politics, which directed their construction remain rich and unexplored terrain. This mystical, aestheticizing compulsion obstructs a better understanding of the built environment.
-by Anonymous


While it's important that OSHA confined space regulations don't differentiate between different kinds of spaces in order to protect the lives of all workers in all situations, the environments that we're generally exploring aren't the sorts of spaces where workers die from oxygen deprivation or poisonous gases. Maintenance and inspection needs push workers into places that we would never go and which we have no interest in going.

The tunnels and other spaces talked about above, and which you can see on the site whenever the boingboing barrage peters out, have active airflow and are not serious atmospheric hazards. Bad air can be a lethal concern in comms and electrical vaults and small sanitary sewers. In large pipes that are self-ventilated by flowing stormwater or combined sewage, with multiple openings to ground level, the atmosphere -- while not always ideal -- tends to take care of itself.

So yes, I'm cognizant of the concerns you're raising, but the vast majority of these places are safe enough to not require the rather severe investment that a good-quality gas detector represents. Even in The Skin of a Lion (the brick-lined combined sewer I talk about above), the air was fine, and the only safety concern we had was not getting washed into the interceptor which we knew lay somewhere up ahead.

Same goes for the exploration of collector sewers in Montreal that's been taking place of late, combined sewers which are far more hairy than anything we've yet opened up in Ontario. The air by and large has been fine; of far greater concern have been the physical risks posed by the powerful flows of sewage in some of those systems.

So nutshell: we always pay close attention to the air, but apart from occasionally stirring up some H2S and skipping whatever lies beyond it (usually not much since it's produced by stagnant water and decaying organic matter), our practical experience falls outside both the letter and spirit of OSHA regs and we're okay with that. In twenty years of drain exploring in Australia, no one has died from bad air, and based on what we've inhaled so far we don't expect the record to be any different here in Canada. For specific applications where we had reason to question the air, I'd use a gas detector. For the drains and sewers we're generally finding our way into it, it would just end up as one more expensive piece of electronics for me to drop in the water.

(On the other hand, if anyone would like to send us one, I'll try very hard not to drop it...)

The photos that accompany the interview are all single exposures, most shot on consumer-grade Canon digital SLRs (some on 300D, though I'm now using a 20D exclusively) -- a few date from 2003-2004 and were actually shot on an S30 compact digital. Digital post-processing consists of levels/sharpening/colour correction (mostly to absolve my own chronic failings wrt exposures).

The variety of colours mostly comes from the dynamics of the portable fluorescents we've been using lately, which when shining on the right materials can often be pushed white, green or blue depending on what's most appropriate for the shot. It's a fairly conventional colour correction though, as is the range between near-white and blood-orange that I can get out of our halogens in the right circumstances. Oh, and anything that is bright red and isn't strapped to someone's head is a road flare.

There's no HDR or other multiple exposures trickery going on here (though I'd imagine I could get some better results if I'd work out how to do the latter). Exposure times for the properly underground shots are usually in the range of 5-30 seconds, though the frame from the Rankine wheelpit in which I appear repeatedly was an exposure several minutes in length.

From a technical standpoint, I'm no expert and the photos, while sometimes arresting, do show this, so I can't really comment on what merit they are actually due, but let me know if you have any other questions about my process.
-by Michael Cook


Wonderful interview and images, thanks.

I love Michael's comment and attitude: every building is on a trajectory. Everything we see is in in a single moment of its ongoing deterioration, or, in the case of renovation projects, an attempt to slow the process. I wish I could drum this sentiment and world view into the brain of every architect and architecture student that I know, as well as into the minds of the general public. The built environment lives and breathes around us, reflecting our desires back to us, and I feel like most people don't feel it.
Exploring these spaces is like exploring outer space - I'm glad to see that spirit of discovery happening. Again, absolutely beautiful, thank you for doing it.
-by Donna

In my home town, supposedly the city engineers do not know exactly where all the pipes are and they haven't been really renovated on a big way since the early 20th century at the latest. New York City recently rebuilt their main water pipes (as shown in progress in Die Hard With a Vengeance), and the work involved in that was awesome and impressive. All this engineering is under our feet, and in big cities, its big enough to walk around in.

Just be careful, as commenter Shedd notes - you won't run into alligators, but you might fall and bash a head, get into bad air, or get trapped by a sudden surge of water. I can't recommend digging around in these storm drains and sewers, but I can suggest looking around your home. Chances are, even if you're in a city, there are sights to see and secret places that will charm you tucked away.

Whatever you do, don't miss the pictures accompanying this interview, they are stunning. This guy has to get a book deal.

Engineering, Architecture, Sewers, Photography