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I've
known about this drain for years, never got around to exploring it, blah blah
blah... Well, we finally got around to exploring it. And it was good.
The infall is a 6' tall x 12' wide rectangular tunnel with stone walls. We had
to climb (or in my case, plummet) into a deep culvert to get to the entrance.
After a long, easy walk through the rectangular tunnel, it made a left turn and
morphed into a beautiful 7' brick arch, with short stone walls and a natural
(bedrock and mud) floor. Occasional debris in the tunnel backed up water, making
it a little deep.
We eventually came to a junction room, where the tunnel we were in intersected
with a nice 6' brick arch to the right, and a pair of taller brick arches to our
left. There was a large pile of woody debris here, and the water in the middle
of the room looked to be exceptionally deep. We could see the drain outfall
through the pipes to our left, so we headed right. The tunnel here had a nice
yellow brick floor, that eventually switched to red brick.
After a long stretch of brick arch, the tunnel got even more interesting. The
was a triangular loop of sorts, with a mud-filled brick arch forming one side,
an 8'x6' concrete rectangle forming another side, and the third side being a
heavily mud and debris-filled concrete rectangle. We turned right, and continued
for a ways through a rectangular tunnel. The floor here was full of rocks and
trash... I'm fighting an inner ear infection, so constantly having to shift my
balance on the rough floor made me very dizzy.
We headed back to the triangular loop, and headed down a side pipe that
continued off the mud-filled leg. From a map that I had obtained from the city,
we had theorized that this connected to the south half of the drain system. We
were right. This connector tunnel was crawling height, pretty dry, and had a few
interesting brick and stone rooms along the way.
The connector tunnel eventually got taller, and had a large gutter slit that we
ended up using as our exit later on. The tunnel made a left turn, and became
another 6' brick arch. A large sewer pipe ran along one wall. The tunnel smelled
like poop, and even through I couldn't find a leak in the sewer pipe anywhere,
there was a lot of toilet paper in the water.
After a long ways of stinky tunnel, we came to a short overflow pipe, connecting
to a mud-filled tunnel of equal size to the one we were in (about 8' tall at
that point). Shortly, we came to the exit... four 8' tall arched pipes dumping
out into a huge concrete culvert. Very cool.
We backtracked through the sewer pipe section, and made a very obvious exit
through the gutter slit in the connector tunnel (next to an intersection, with
several groups of people watching us). It was excellent.
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