Occupational hazard
A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.
“We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood,” said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.
It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.
“Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn’t get rid of it,” said Huebner.
Gross. But what I want to know is, in the course of their daily work, do sewer workers normally have waste water spraying into to their faces/mouths/eyes? And in that respect, how is blood worse than, for example, feeces? Perhaps it’s the quasi-biblical nature of the event. After all, God never turned the Nile into a river of poop.
D. Greene wrote:
It’s worse than feces in that you can also contract HIV or Heptatitis, among other things from it, you liberal arts wanker. That worker has probably already been tested for those. Of course, he could get E. Coli from feces, so it’s not like either one is preferable. There are all kinds of microbes and bacteria floating around in sewers as it is.
Posted on 30-Mar-07 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
John wrote:
While we’re on the topic, anyone notice that the Palestinian village of Umm Nasser in northern Gaza was flooded with 56,000 cubic meters of raw sewage when the wall of a cesspool collapsed there last week? Nearly a dozen people died, presumably drowned in human waste. As if those people don’t have enough problems.
Posted on 31-Mar-07 at 4:23 pm | Permalink