Every morning, huge jet vacs make their way to the streets of Kansas City.
"It's like an oversized vacuum cleaner,” KC Water Utility Supervisor, Dorsey Golston said. “What they're doing is sucking out the debris from the catch basin."
These vacs suck up all types of trash that makes their homes in catch basins. Some things are more surprising than others.
“You know when they say kitchen sink? Well we've literally gotten a kitchen sink from a catch basin,” Golston said. “We get dead animals, weapons, police have called us to help them retrieve weapons for them."
Golston says there are seven crews that head out to clean the catch basins.
Usually it takes them about 15 minutes to clean. But that depends on what they find.
“Tires, we got tires out here,” he said. “Some of the things we got out here we try to figure ourselves, how do they get them in there? But somehow we get them in and we get them out.”
There’s about 55,000 inlets and catch basins, with the goal of cleaning about 15,000 a year, according to KC Water.
Over the past five years, KC Water has averaged about 15,000 a year.
“Our ultimate goal is to remove as much debris from the catch basin so that the water can have an unimpeded flow to the treatment plant to be processed, so we can continue to get that high quality water that Kansas city is famous for,” Golston said.
During this time of year, leaves can be the biggest problem.
“Please, please don't rake your leaves down into the catch basin, and tell your neighbors,” Golston said. “Because at some point it's going to stomp up that catch basin and you're going to have street flooding and a lot of times, a lot of those leaves will wash down into another part of the system where we have what they call interceptors and then they'll cause them to overflow - which will also cause backups in people's basements.”
There is a city ordinance that prohibits homeowners from sweeping leaves or grass clipping into the street.
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Rae Daniel can be reached at Rae.Daniel@KSHB.com.
