It flows downhill

Matt Flegenheimer has an article in The New York Times about shit in the Hudson:

All around Stephen Askew was raw sewage, eight feet deep, flooding a crippled waste-treatment plant in Harlem. But Askew never had a choice; he had to go in. It was three days after a catastrophic fire damaged the plant and began sending waste into the city’s waterways, forcing the closing of beaches, and workers were engaged in a desperate bid to restart operations.
The temperature inside the plant on 23 July exceeded 120 degrees. Askew had vaulted over a railing onto a raft floating in the sewage and paddled to the plant’s backup pump. In the darkness, he stood up in the boat, careful not to overturn it, and opened a nonfunctioning valve manually. The pump restarted and, soon after, sewage stopped flowing into the Hudson.
“I had to be the captain, I guess,” Askew, the plant superintendent, said. “If we put any more sewage in the river, it’s going to affect a million people at Coney Island on a hundred-degree Saturday.” His raft ride was one of several makeshift maneuvers that helped prevent the damage from the fire at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem from continuing to wreak havoc across the city, according to workers interviewed this week.
The building’s designer visited to address fears that its roof might collapse. A supervisor was called out of retirement. Workers traded twenty-minute shifts in a 140-degree engine room. One employee shaved his beard, ten years in the growing, so he could press a respirator snug against his skin and enter the building.
“It could be weeks” before the flow of sewage was stopped, Caswell F. Holloway, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said he recalled thinking after the fire. In that case, he feared, “it’s only a matter of time until it extends to the beaches.”
No workers were injured in the blast, which occurred on 20 July during lunch hour; a rare time when no employees are near engines. Though the plant is again operational, with some limitations, the damage will not soon disappear. In the main engine room, the walls, once beige, now appear black, painted by soot from end to end. The engine where the fire began, resembling a locomotive train doubled onto itself, remains disabled, singed from a fire whose cause is still under investigation. Lights on control panels have shriveled. Plastic buttons used to operate the engines dangle out of their sockets, like cheese hanging from a pizza.
“You know when you turn a barbecue on and it makes that whoosh sound?” David Prestigiacomo, an engineer at the Department of Environmental Protection, said of the fire. “It was like ten thousand of those.” He and others remembered how blackness enveloped the building. Workers staggered toward, then away from, the smoke. They could not see their own feet, even with flashlights. When the plant finally stopped shaking, some wondered whether New York had sprouted new fault lines.
The damage could have been worse. But when the plant was built more than 25 years ago, Martin Fradua, a lead designer, pushed for concrete fireproofing for structural steel beams, despite its high cost. Though a beam in the engine room was mangled in the fire, twisting inward like a broken leg, the main girder remained sound, anchored by material designed to withstand as much as three hours of fire, Fradua said. “Without that, the roof would have been sagging,” he said. “It may have fallen down.”
After the fire was put out, the efforts to restart the plant were often risky. Electricians groped in the dark, trying to supply emergency lighting and power. Temporary pumps had to be obtained from out of state. Askew’s gondola journey through the waste may have been most memorable, employees said, but even it was a gamble. The pump he restarted was not designed to function underwater. The sewage buildup in the basement has since been drained, and an inspection of the pump showed no damage, he said.
As plant workers labored inside, a parade of workers from city agencies and local organizations swarmed around the facility, along the Hudson River between 137th and 145th Streets. An ambulance crew treated workers overcome by the extreme heat, a team of health officials tested water samples, and technicians helped to reassemble radio equipment. A bus rolled onto the site days after the fire, serving as a break room for workers who were caked in sweat and soot. The mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting supplied movie trailers in which plant officials could hold meetings.
More than two weeks after the fire, dozens of empty water bottles still litter the engine room floor. In the plant’s lobby, an old document remains pinned to a wall. “Tips on coping with work stress,” it reads. “Create a balanced schedule and don’t overcommit yourself.” The lobby buzzes with contractors and city employees, some of whom have been working up to sixteen hours a day.
“It’s a fire in your house,” said Prestigiacomo, the engineer, who has worked at the plant since it opened in 1986. “Our mission is to clean the water. It’s important to me.” Prestigiacomo has not spent a day away from the plant since the blaze. Dark circles tug at his eyes. His goatee, the upshot of the shave required when he donned a respirator to enter the building, has failed to pry a compliment from a wife whom he has not seen much lately. “You do what you have to do,” he said.

Rico says that 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' was never truer, but you would have to be 'askew' to do what that guy did...