How it feels … to be a sewage diver ...

If certain members of the Toowoomba City Council had their way, we'd all be sewage divers ...


Excerpt from The Age:

How it feels … to be a sewage diver

4 January 2008

Some people might pooh-pooh it, but Brendan Walsh likes his job.

I've been a professional diver for 25 years. My company will do any job that involves wetness. As long as there's a fluid of some kind, we'll attack it.

We'll do anything from pier rebuilds and bringing up boats that have sunk, to high-tech diving in sewage farms. Mostly we do general maintenance at the sewage farms but it could be rebuilding pumps or clearing blockages.

I've done about 1000 hours of sewage diving. Working in a pit of sewage is very difficult; you can't see anything for a start, so everything's done by feel.

You have to be quite mechanical to work out what's wrong, and how to fix it, and you also have to be able to relay your thoughts in a clear manner so the support guys on the surface can think about the same problem.

We have full communications in the suits so the divers can talk through the job.

And it all has to be done in zero visibility; a lot of times we're placing equipment within a millimetre, so you're drilling holes and using hammers blind. All professional divers tend to be tradesmen first.

Normally when they build a farm they will take photos as they make it and we look at those and work out a plan before we go down.

We can be under several metres of sewage for up to four hours.

The first metre or two of sewage can be quite dense. We've had it that thick that the guys have dropped spanners and they haven't fallen.

It's black and silent. It's just pure black, you can't see anything. It can be very claustrophobic and it takes careful planning before you go ahead.

You can walk through the sewage but not really swim. We've had times when there were big islands we've had to remove when pumps have broken down. We've had to go in with big suction heads and suck 500 foot of solid poo out — lovely days!

It doesn't smell bad at all for the diver; he's normally on processed air. The hardest job is the people who have to wash them down and clean them up afterwards.

It's a very serious job. We have stand-by divers fully dressed and ready to go in case something goes wrong. We have people in full plastic protective gear for the wash down.

For one dive we'd have a minimum support team of five people.

For a sewage dive we have the full contamination rubber suits that cost about $7500 and last about 150 to 300 dives. The helmets we wear weigh about 11 kilograms, so just to walk along before you get in the water takes a lot of strength, if you fall over you can do yourself major damage.

It's full-encapsulation diving — which means you're fully dry inside the suit, it has sealed cuffs on it, and the suit connects onto the diver's helmet so nothing touches the skin. We don't come out smelling at all because there's no contact.

The work can be dangerous if things go wrong and you don't plan properly. It's an extremely specialised area. Suits can flood, that's the main problem, plus you have to keep a watch on the amount of air you have.

When you're about to get in for the first time you stand on the side and hope the suit doesn't let you down.

The worst thing that can happen in a sewage dive is if you tear the suit and the suit floods. I'm pretty careful, so it's never happened to me. You might occasionally get a glove tear but that's really no difference to a piece of toilet paper ripping in the morning.

It is a problem still though. You have to abort the dive and clean and disinfect the diver's hands. It's a very big health issue. My divers have every available injection they can get. Every single diver has to have every inoculation on the list because there are numerous diseases floating around in there.

Before a dive you have to limit your fluids because once you start you can't go to the toilet and if you need to go you've probably got 15-20 minutes from when you decide you have to go until you can go. You've got to get out, be decontaminated and cleaned up.

We have to run a training course for the sewage diving and test the divers a fair bit before we let them near it. We do a test run in a pool, dress them in all the gear and make sure they're happy because we charge a lot of money for this work and we need to know the guy can handle it.

Some sewage farms can only turn their machines off for us to work on them between 1am and 3am when the flow is down, otherwise everyone's poo starts coming back up their toilets and then they complain.

I remember the very first day I went out to a farm to look at a job, and I thought: "My god, the guys are going to shoot me for taking this on." But the thing is they all love the work.

They all put their hand up for it. It's very satisfying to do the job in absolute zero visibility. It's about as high a level of diving that we can do.

It doesn't make me feel sick to do the work. I've never worked a day inside in my life, it's a good job. We have divers ringing from all over Australia trying to get a start with us and we get flown all around the country to do it.

I don't know if I would call it a glamorous job but it looks very good on a diver's log book to say that he's done the full-contamination, encapsulation diving.

People usually stand back a bit when they find out what we do — most of the time we can get a clear space at the bar.

It doesn't really worry us, what we're diving in, but it would be nicer if people actually chewed their corn.

See - Sewage divers.