In mid-March of 2007, a Minneapolis city employee was cleaning a sewer line in the northeast part of town. He was working over a manhole, when suddenly a geyser of human and animal blood began spraying into his face and mouth from below.
It turns out a medical laboratory was routinely dumping blood into the sewer, an act allowed in the city. The city’s Metropolitan Council maintains that blood in sewers is “no more harmful than most other wastes in there.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control stance is equivocal: “While any item that has had contact with blood, exudates or secretions may be potentially infective, it is not usually considered practical or necessary to treat all such waste as infective.”
Meanwhile, the worker worries that he may have contracted a pathogen through any blood he might have ingested. His superiors didn’t know that the lab has a permit to discharge blood, so they didn’t warn workers or provide protective gear.
Since then, the Metropolitan Council requires workers above the manhole to wear goggles or a face mask, or both. In the future, the city will warn the lab when it is coming to clean the sewer, so the lab can stop all blood discharges until the job is done.
This is just one incident of a cleaning technician exposed to a potential biohazard. Here’s what some readers are doing to protect their technicians.
“Fortunately, we haven’t had anything like that happen, but we do have lines that run through hospitals,” says Tom Birdsall, assistant senior collection supervisor with the Monroe County (N.Y.) Department of Environmental Services.
The city provides safety gear for its sewer workers. “Our employees have all the personal protective equipment they need, whether it be masks, goggles, things of that nature,” Birdsall says. “Full face protection is provided for some tasks, though it’s available to anyone who requests it, or if I instruct them to use it. We also advise them to get their Hepatitis C shots and any others they might need.” Some vaccinations are mandatory for Rochester workers, while others are optional.
Twice a year, the department brings in public safety experts to do presentations about avoiding contact with pathogens and other on-the-job
safety issues.
“Normally, while we’re jetting a line, we’ll have on a white suit, safety glasses, hardhat with visor and safety gloves to protect us while we’re jetting a line,” explains Hubert Bardell of Veolia Water North America, which performs wastewater management for the City of Kenner, on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.
The company also provides new employee safety orientation on wearing their personal protective equipment and on any hazards specific to the job they’re hired for. This is followed up by regular monthly training that usually addresses some safety issue.
“We give our workers Hepatitis A and B shots and provide rubber gloves, boots, padding and anything else they feel they need,” reports Travis Pearson, water and sewer supervisor for the City of Powder Springs, Ga.
“We get them everything they need. We also have monthly safety meetings. The safety mask and glasses are important for water and sewer, but our guys aren’t down in the sewers all the time. So we cover such things as watching out for each other, being aware of your surroundings, and wearing seat belts, too.”
Pearson says actual in-sewer work occurs roughly once a week. If a specific safety issue
arises, it is addressed in an unscheduled safety meeting outside the regular monthly session. When a new sewer project comes up, he gathers his crew together beforehand to discuss potential hazards, so no one is surprised.
Pearson’s counterpart in the Sanitation Depart-ment, Rick Gravitt, holds similar pre-work safety meetings as well as monthly post-project critiques.
Hearing about the Minneapolis incident, Gravitt says, “I don’t doubt that a bit. Every month, we do research through articles about this kind of thing, and we give our guys the opportunity to address any issues they’re concerned about or request any safety equipment they think they need.
“We’re very proud that our city — the mayor and council — is supportive of providing anything we need when it comes to protecting our workers.”
Since another Iowa municipality lost a jetter technician in a fatal accident resulting from a jetter head that came loose, all sewer workers in West Des Moines get extensive safety training. A senior operator will take a new hire out for 500 hours on the combination truck, jetters and other equipment. Once they have their hours in, they take a written test, then have to pass peer approval.
“Occasionally, you’ll get someone who needs more training, because their peers don’t feel they’re ready to be out in the field on the equipment yet,” explains Mike Coughlon, operations supervisor. He believes the peer approval process is important not only for the new hire, but also for the people he or she will be working with to express a sense of confidence in his or her skills.
“We actually have Vactor Manufacturing come in once or twice a year to give hands-on presentations on equipment operation, and the issue of avoiding blood-borne pathogens is included in that training,” Coughlon says.
Workers wear protective clothing and gear, and all city trucks carry safety kits with immediate cleansing solutions and first aid in case of skin contact or the need for eye flushing. The city also has a contract health provider, and anyone exposed to a serious hazard is immediately sent downtown to the provider’s office for treatment.
