After entering a concrete tunnel, the man would enter a chamber with access to manholes and the street. Beyond that, raw sewage.
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UPDATE: The search for the man resumed at 9 a.m. according to Newark police.
This diagram illustrates linked sections of the Newark sewer system, where a man fleeing police disappeared Wednesday.PVSC
NEWARK -- Whatever punishment he thought he was fleeing, a man who swam across the Passaic River and into the Newark sewer system to escape police on Wednesday subjected himself to what officials said would be unsanitary, unsafe and possibly deadly conditions.
Greg Tramotozzi, executive director of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, which operates the massive system that treats Newark and 47 other communities' waste, said the 31-year-old fugitive from Roselle had entered into a warren of dark, cramped spaces, with deadly gases hanging in the air, harmful bacteria and chemicals lining every surface, and the flow of human waste.
"Let's put it this way: That is not an environment you would want to be in for 24 hours," Tramotozzi said Thursday afternoon, more than a full day after Keith Jean had entered the sewer from a point near the Bridge Street Bridge.
Harrison Police say Jean was a passenger in a car that officers saw stopped at Second Street and Cleveland Avenue, near a parking lot where several car break-ins had been reported recently. Police said that officers pulled the car over after it began to move, and subsequently arrested the driver, Aubrey Tucker, 29, of Bloomfield, on outstanding warrants, but that Jean ran the two of blocks to river and jumped in.
Jean then swam toward the Newark side, and after briefly clinging at midstream to a support of the Bridge Street Bridge. Police said they offered to help Jean, but he refused, telling them he was "not going back to jail."
Police said Jean then swam to the Newark riverbank, where he climbed into a pipe and disappeared. That was about 1 p.m. on Wednesday, and despite a search using a robot and cameras to plumb the system's putrid depths, as of Thursday evening Jean had not been found.
Based on where the police said Jean climbed into the system, Tramontozzi said it had to have been at the Clay Street Outflow, a 9'4" X 7' pipe-like tunnel where a mixture of storm water and sewage spills out into the river on rainy days. Newark is one of several cities with combined sewer systems where storm water and sewage share some passageways, so outflows are necessary to prevent heavy volumes of storm water from overwhelming the treatment plant and literally washing away the bacteria that consumes waste.
Fortunately for Jean, Wednesday was sunny, and Tramontozzi said there would have been little if any storm or wastewater flowing out here he went in. That might have allowed Jean to make his way, through the darkness, up a slight grade, over a distance of two blocks or so, on surfaces covering with filthy residue, to the next area of the sewer system, the regulator chamber.
The chamber is a kind of reservoir, a concrete box that uses gravity to separate stormwater from sewage, allowing the storm warter (and some sewage) to spill down the outflow, while directing the heavier sewage toward the PVSC's interceptor tunnel, or main sewer line.
While Tramontozzi said drowning in the chamber is a possibility -- he did not know its dimensions -- he said there are many other dangers, including gases that form from the breakdown of organic materials.
One is hydrogen sulfide, which has the smell or rotten eggs and is poisonous to inhale, as well as corrosive and highly flammable. Another is methane, which is not poisonous, but can act as a deadly asphyxiant in confined spaces because it displaces oxygen.
Of course, there are the bacteria found in waste, including Echerichi, or E. coli.
And because Newark is a combined sewer system, it is a depository for the chemicals and carcinogens that discharged onto the streets and into the air by automobiles and industry, then carried into storm drains by runoff.
Of course, there is every other vile substance, apart from waste, that is flushed down the toilet by household and commercial users.
Any cut, sore or orifice on Jeans body would be a magnet for infection, said Tramontozzi, is not a doctor, though he is a lawyer.
Late Thursday afternoon, at the request of Newark police, a PVSC crew lowered a camera down three manholes on a block of Division Street that runs along Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium. The manholes were in the middle of the street, a few hundred feet up a slope from the river bank where Jean went underground, right about where the regulator chamber for the Clay Street OUtfall would be located below ground. The crew found nothing.
That same block is where authorities set up a mobile command post, and where Newark PUblic Safety Director Anthony Ambrose said during a late Thursday morning news conference that what had begun as a rescue mission to find Jean alive was becoming a recovery effort in the hope, at least, of finding his body.
"Unless he got out," Ambrose said. "And right now no one has seen him get out."
Finally, the regulator chamber is connected to the sewer system's heart, or more aptly, it's main artery, the interceptor tunnel. The tunnel is a 21-mile concrete subway that runs from Paterson's Great Falls to the PVSC treatment plan in Newark, carrying more than 100 million gallons a day of the digested and expelled remains of everything that 1.5 million households and commercial and institutional users consume, digest, expel and flush.
The diameter of tunnel ranges from a large intestine-like 13' to a much smaller 3.5-feet. There is always some flow of waste moving through it, Tamontozzi said. It seems inconceivable that Jean would venture into the interceptor tunnel voluntarily But even if he had, and even if he were not drowned, asphyxiated, poisoned or too sickened to go on, Tramontozzi said he would not get far because he would be blocked by intermittent sets of heavy iron bars intended to prevent large objects from flowing into the treatment plant and causing damage.
Tramontozzi noted that the regulator chamber would offer Jean what might be his only escape, other than heading back down the outfalll and into the river.
"There's a possibility that he gets out a manhole going out of that chamber," he said.
Man holes, after all, are how workers access sewer systems, though typically from outside in, rather than the other way around. Workers also have each other, as well as pick axes or other heavy tools, to remove the steel manhole covers that typically weigh 90 to 150 pounds.
Still, by planting himself on one of the steel rungs that protrude from the brick chute-like passageway up from the chamber to the manhole, Jean might be able to shoulder the edge of a cover above the rim of the manhole, then work the cover over far enough to exit.
If he did emerge from a man hole, on Division Street, police stationed at the mobile command center would be waiting.
For him to emerge from any other manholes, linked to any other chamber seems remote. The only way to get from one chamber to another without leaving the system, Tramotozzi said, is through the interceptor tunnel.
Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.