One of Nigel Sullivan's team members, Lez Chamberlain, climbs down into the wet well at a Watercare pump station in East Tamaki.
One of Nigel Sullivan's team members, Lez Chamberlain, climbs down into the wet well at a Watercare pump station in East Tamaki.
An occasional series profiling New Zealanders who have lived lives less ordinary yet largely unknown.
Generations of Kiwi men have made livelihoods out of secretly working in sewage. Today, one man reveals the camaraderie, the danger and the “shocking” stench.
From the late 1800s to the 1950s, they trawled thestreets after dusk, operating night carts.
Then when deep wells were bored into cities like Tāmaki Makaurau, they brought pooled excrement up in buckets to clean the pits.
Today they suit up and climb in, using monitors and sucker trucks to keep 90 wells from Pukekohe to Warkworth functioning, mitigating blockages and overflows.
Nigel Sullivan has "the utmost respect" for his team.
Despite his wife telling him it’s not the sort of job to discuss at a dinner table, Nigel, 60, will tell you all about it.
“It’s a very dangerous and dirty job. But it’s a rewarding job at the same time,” he tells the Herald. “I feel like I’m doing something for the environment …”
“You’ve got to have a sense of humour to do it. And a really strong gut.”
Whenever someone complains to Nigel that they have “a sh** job”, he chuckles and tells them: “No, you haven’t.”
You can’t really argue with a man who has been up to his “waist in sh**” at work.
Nigel recalls his first time in a well. It was 2015 and, awash with deep regret as he saw “turds flying all around”, he thought to himself, ”Sh**, what have I got myself into?”
But the former Auckland Electric Power Board lineman - who at 20 saw a colleague die on a power pole next to him - began at Watercare “in the trenches” to prepare to lead a team in servicing transmission pipes - the city’s big sewers and pump stations.
“For me to get knowledge of how to manage these guys, I had to get in the trenches with them. I had to get in the wells, because you can’t lead men unless you’ve done it.
“That could be an old-school theory, but it was quite a culture shock. And that’s where you get the camaraderie and utmost respect for the guys that do this,” he says of his 20 men who go into the wells to “vacuum the carpet, so to speak … cleaning all the fat, removing stones and rags”.
Rags, explains Nigel, are things like wet wipes which became increasingly prevalent during Auckland’s lockdowns and often cause blockages because they don’t break down.
A member of the Watercare maintenance delivery team scrapes away build-up on the walls of a wastewater pump station wet well.
As Nigel’s men, who earn between $25 and $32 an hour, work to clear the wells of rags and the like, they do so amid high levels of hydrogen sulphide, a gas as explosive as it is putrid.
“Imagine the smell in Rotorua, then times it by 10. It is shocking,” he says.
“If you’ve changed a baby’s nappy for the first time, that’s the sort of ‘oh my God’ smell. It’s a bit like that. That’s the way I felt when I first went down. I looked around and there were turds flying all around me and all the products that you shouldn’t see,” he says, adding the team have found wallets, phones, syringes, and sometimes carcasses from abattoirs.
Even with layers of gear, including thick waders that seal around the top of gumboots and a chemical suit, gloves, harnesses and a breathing apparatus, the smell still permeates.
So much so that Watercare has showers and saunas on-site where men will spend an hour sweating out the stench.
“That smell does stick in your skin,” says Nigel. “That’s what my wife said to me when I came home. She goes, ‘Have you had a shower?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah’. She’d say, ‘Oh my God, go and have another’.
“You can’t smell it yourself. You put on a lot of deodorant. It might be my wife’s sensitive nose,” he muses.
Beyond the smell, the gas makes going into the wells incredibly dangerous.
“It can knock you out,” explains Nigel. “Because if you are in a well and you’ve got that hydrogen sulphide, it’s like a rotten egg smell when you go in, but as you get used to it, it dulls your senses and you get immune to it. You can’t smell it. We have gas monitors that can test it. We have gas masks; ventilation that goes through.
“You’ve got confined space. You’ve got the gas levels and you’ve got heights,” he says of the wells, some of which are 20 metres deep.
“The planning is immense before we put anyone in that situation, and health and safety is paramount.”
When Cyclone Gabrielle devastated the region last month, “everyone was called in, even if they were on leave”, says Nigel. “For my team, it was every man and his dog. I worked during Cyclone Bola in 1988 as a young project manager with the Auckland Electric Power Board, but these [storms] were on a different scale. We have had some of the largest amounts of rainfall I have ever seen in Auckland, which had a wide impact on both water and wastewater operations for my teams.”
While some of the men on Nigel’s team have been in their jobs for between 20 and 40 years, he says it’s a line of work where recruitment is difficult.
Those who do tend to put their hand up are descendants of men who were in the same line of work.
“I’ve got two guys that have just started with me. One is the grandson of a guy that’s just retired. So, his grandfather would’ve told him what he’s getting himself into.
“If you want to do it, it’s an interesting job,” says Nigel, who asks his staff the same question each morning: “‘You still living the dream?’ And they go, ‘Yeah, Nigel, we’re living the dream’.”
