What treasures await in Philadelphia-area sewers?

Associated Press

ASTON, Pa.

The two men — sewer workers — never know what they might find in a day’s work.

So it was with a bit of expectation that they recently snaked their robotic camera down into a manhole, looking for cracks and water leaks in the sewer pipes.

Andrew Brzezicki and his partner, Larry Fisher, both with the Southwest Delaware County Municipal Authority, flushed the lines with a high-pressure water hose to clean them, sifted out grit caught in a screen, and then began to look.

Most evident were the usual globs of shiny orange-colored grease — a homeowner’s nightmare when it clogs a pipe.

But it is the other stuff they occasionally encounter that can make their day.

“You have to be at the right place at the right time,” said sewer maintenance supervisor Brzezicki as he carefully maneuvered the camera angle from a computer monitor inside his specially equipped truck.

“Anything you flush down the toilet can wind up down here.”

“Anything” can include gold bracelets, diamond rings and cash.

In Aston, with 82 miles of sewer lines, the crew’s payload is about $10 in change every month, said Brzezicki, a 15-year employee. About once every two months a worker will find a piece of jewelry, though mostly costume.

Most sewer departments have a finders-keepers philosophy.

“If the guy is willing to reach in and grab it, it is his,” said George Crum, director of the Southwest Delaware County Municipal Authority, which serves parts of lower Delaware County, including Aston, Middletown, Chester Heights and Upper Providence.

Bracelets, diamond rings, money, toothbrushes, cell phones, dog bones — and even two guns recovered after a burglary — have been known to make their way into the Radnor Township sewers, said Mark Domenick, sewer supervisor.

Mostly, said Tom Ferguson, plant manager at the Philadelphia’s Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant, Philadelphia sewer workers see trash and catfish that swim into the plant during heavy rains. Occasionally a wad of well-worn bills will get trapped in a grate used to filter out the trash. The found money gets spent treating co-workers to lunch.

After one memorable catch 15 years ago, Philadelphia sewer workers added a member, of sorts, to their staff.

Wes Smith, now 55, was busy working near the bar screens, the device that catches larger trash items, when he looked up and saw a foot-long snake coiled around a pipe.

“Curly,” as the ball python was christened, was captured, given a bath and now sleeps in a large terrarium, acting as an ambassador in the facility’s educational department of the treatment facility on Pattison Avenue. When grade schoolers and tour groups ask what items workers find in the city’s 2,960 miles of sewer pipes — some large enough to walk through — they are introduced to the reptile, now more than 4 feet long.

“He has more time in than most of the employees,” said Joe Davis, 54, a treatment-plant operator at the facility. They keep Curly happy with a couple of heat lamps and a white rat from a pet store now and then.