Dirty Drains

Video Transcript
Note: All WP Saskatchewan video transcripts are edited for flow and readability.

(Fred) “So it’s kind of a clean side of a dirty job.”
 
(Megan) “Yeah. It’s not something you see every day.”
 
(Fred) “You’re learning more about the way the city operates, and how the sewer systems work.”

(Narrator) “In a city that’s as flat as the prairie horizon, going with the flow isn’t always as easy as it sounds. When the slope of the land is not enough to ensure stuff flows downhill, meet the professionals who engineer Regina’s water systems, tackling one odd job after the next.”
 
(Megan) “I think a lot of times people just don’t understand the implications, that putting certain things down our sewer system has. You know, your left-over cereal milk down the drain, by rinsing out your salad bowl down the drain. Anything like that, over time builds up in our system.”

(Narrator) “What is the main enemy of Regina’s sewer stewards? It’s “FOG”! No, not a heavy mist coming off Wascana Lake, this time “FOG” stands for fats, oils and grease.”

(Megan) “Hi, my name is Megan Windjack. I am a coordinator of Water and Sewer Programming with the City of Regina. My job is working with the source control group to help keep fats, oils and greases out of our city’s sewer system.”
 
(Fred) “Hey, so my name is Fred Racko. I’m a technologist for the City of Regina in the sewer department. So my job is to look and maintain the computer systems. I provide data from there, for other technologists and engineers.

A whole variety of jobs that make things work. We need mechanics and electricians, to make sure all the things are actually operating properly. We need the operators to make sure that the systems are pumping and working in the way they should to be monitored. A lot of their work tends to overlap each other, so they work together to figure out what they need to do that day, so they’re not tripping over each other’s feet. So we do our best to, one, tell people don’t put fats, oils and greases in the sewer or down their sink, and then we have programs to make sure that what does get in there gets cleaned out.”

(Megan) “We have a group of four different crews, and throughout the week we have scheduled appointments with food service establishments throughout the city. And we have a program that has logged all previous inspections on this. When we go and visit these facilities, the source control inspectors give a short little educational speech on how to properly maintain their grease traps, and on the importance of maintaining their grease traps.”
 
(Narrator) “In this ongoing battle to keep the water systems running smoothly, this team is like the foot soldiers, putting their boots on the ground to fight FOG at the source.”
 
(Megan) “We provide educational materials such as pamphlets. We have over the sink posters that they can use to make their staff aware.”

(Elvis) “Cold water will help out a lot, instead of it liquefying that grease like that, if you use a little more cold, it’ll get you a little longer for cleaning too.”
 
(Megan) “They gather their equipment, which includes a plastic dipping tube, a flashlight, a screwdriver, all small equipment like that. And they go into the facility, and they open what is known as a grease trap. And what they do with their tube is they dip it into it, and from that they’re able to tell the percentage of fats, oils, and grease that is collected.
 
We have in our bylaw that all these traps are to maintain 25% or less of fats, oils and grease. Once they hit that threshold, they are to have it pumped out by a certified waste hauler. So when we visit these locations, what we’re looking for is an excessive amount of fats, oils, and greases. Also known as FOG.”
 
(Fred) “Fats, oils, and greases, they start clogging up the sewer pipes.”
 
(Megan) “They’re in a liquid form. As they travel through our system they solidify and cause blockages.”
 
(Fred) “The pipes, if there’s enough grease in them, they start building up in the walls and then it gets progressively smaller. So, then it can’t hold anything. Then it has the potential to get plugged. Then if the sewers plugged, that starts backing up into people’s houses.”
 
(Megan) “Any kind of sewer backup in any facility is not a good thing.”
 
(Fred) “Bad health. It can make people sick. So that’s why we keep sewage out of people’s houses. Or can back up and get into the creek before it’s treated, not where it’s supposed to be, causing more damage to the environment.”
 
(Narrator)It’s a pretty good plan. There’s just one problem. Gravity, and a city so flat that you could see every corner of it from a five story office building.
 
(Fred) So our sewage has to flow through pipes. They have to be sloped downhill and there’s only so far you can go before you’ve tunneled too far into the earth. Regina’s flat, so the idea is you go down a little ways, then use a lift station to lift the sewage up, and then it goes down again. So, there’s a little bit of a seesaw motion until it reaches here, the end of the line, at which point the sewage is then pumped out to the EPCOR treatment plant, which is west of the city. The City of Regina has about 30 different lift stations, because we’re flat and there’s a lot of places to pump sewage from. We have separate ones for our domestic system and separate ones for the storm sewer system.”
 
(Derek) “We look after storm stations as well to move water from areas that won’t drain into a channel naturally. So, we assist the water to get where it needs to be.

(Narrator) And to solve that problem means, you guessed it, another odd job.
 
(Derek) “There’s some of this area that drains into here and some of this new area, including a school and including a kitchen in that school, if I’m not mistaken, I’m not sure if it was built with a grease trap, so we often have a grease problem here.

I’m just going to pump the station down so we can see what the floor of the wet well looks like.

You can smell, it’s getting kind of gassy, but our monitor is still saying it’s only… our air is good. We have to wear a monitor that tells us the amount of oxygen. This is H2S, C0 and LEL levels. So right now, we’re still good. There’s no evidence of any H2S.
 
Yeah, you can see the grease hanging in the air there right now off those rails, so that would be difficult to bring up that pump. We’d have to address that. It’s drawing the grease towards it. It wants to send it up the pipe. So, while the station doesn’t have a lot of grease, it does have some heavier debris, like road debris that can build up on the bottom, stuff that doesn’t float. Grease floats fortunately, and unfortunately. It just means grease and air compete for the same space at the top of our equipment. And sometimes that can cause us a lot of grief.”
 
(Narrator) So we’ve combatted FOG at the source. We’ve pumped it, lifted it, and monitored it. Where does it all go? It’s the all-time deep, dark, odd jobs mothership.
 
(Fred) “So all the sewage in the city of Regina, essentially comes through this building. We have to pump it out to the treatment plant. Our sewage has to be of a certain quality so it doesn’t wreck the process at the sewage treatment plant.

We have a system of three different force mains. We can choose any combination of them, depending on our operations to send it out. So, this little piping setup lets us take a sample from any one of the force mains and test it for various quality bits like nitrogen, phosphorus, and bacteria. Yeah, green light means were ‘safe’.
 
So, essentially this is what our sewage looks like coming from the city. This stuff floating up on top, this is grease chunks. These are things that can plug our sewers. If they get huge, they’re called “fatbergs”.

Oh, we’re getting a little bit of a beep here. We’re okay, though. The sewage comes through here and passes through these screens. It’s basically like a big comb. Any solids get trapped in here, on the screens, and then a big comb comes through and basically lifts them all up to the top.

And these are where they collect all the screenings. I’m just going to open up this panel. So that’s what the inside of a hopper looks like. The idea is this collects them. They go into this trough at the bottom, where it basically squishes out the sewer juice and just leaves a solid (slight chuckle), and then those solids go on to this conveyor belt. The conveyor belts come up here, and it dumps into this dump truck which throws all the debris into the landfill. Ultimately all the sewage that comes through becomes dirt. We get about two dump trucks worth of this stuff from the city every week. The plant has to operate 24/7, it can’t ever go down. That’s one of the rules.”
 
(Narrator) Ah, the great circle of fats, oils and grease. With terms like “fatbergs” and “sewer juice”, who knew that these odd jobs could be so entertaining. With pros like Fred, Jordan and Megan going with the flow, Regina’s water systems are in good hands.”

Credits:
Water Maintenance Team Members- Fred Rackow, Ken Katehur, Megan Windjack & MD Shahran Haque.

Filmed at the Wascana Pool & the McCarthy Pumping Station in Regina, Saskatchewan.