Down The Drain : The dark. The stench. The creatures that slither past. All are daily companions of the workers who toil in the city’s sewers.

John McCormick remembers his baptism.

Sixty feet below Los Angeles, he hunkered low as he waded through a river of raw sewage in the labyrinth of cramped tunnels, pipes and waste-water conduits that crisscross the city’s insides like dirty veins.

As his flashlight beam pierced the roiling, pitch-black netherworld, he slipped on a patch of slime and fell into the muck--up to his neck.

McCormick, 54, has seen whole crews go down like dazed dominoes. As though he were some novice roller skater grasping for balance, one man stumbles in the ooze and pulls the others along with him. The unfortunate soul at the bottom, workers say, endures the sewer’s fiercest initiation: Tasting raw effluent.

“It makes you want to go home and take a long, hot shower,” he says. “You just want to get clean. And I mean right away.”

One of about 300 employees of the city’s Wastewater Collection Division, McCormick has taken countless steamy showers to scrub away the sewer’s bile, the unsavory ebb and flow of his profession.

Plumbing the nation’s largest sewer system for nearly three decades, he has traversed the city’s 6,500 miles of sewer lines and 1,400 miles of storm drains--vast separate networks that sprawl from San Pedro to Chatsworth. He has snaked through narrow, effluent-clogged pipes and ventured into spooky storm drains cavernous enough to swallow a fleet of trucks.

The years have not dulled his senses. No matter how many times he goes below, McCormick’s skin still crawls at the sheer power of the darkness, the stench from the potent flow beneath him and the eerie, disembodied rush of water that comes from the flushing of toilets on the surface, far away from this horrible place.

This is dangerous, unpredictable work. Every day, 400 million gallons of waste water flow along a fecal freeway toward four area treatment plants. That’s enough liquid to fill four stadiums as big as the Coliseum. And when it rains, as many as 15 billion gallons of runoff rush through storm drains, by-passing the treatment plants, headlong toward the sea.

Sewer workers say that while no day working below city streets is easy, the recent storms have made the storm drains flow like strong rivers. Many have worked overtime to patrol key conduits, ensuring that the system has no weak links.

Sewer work continually ranks among the top three most dangerous jobs in the nation, behind coal mining and petroleum work, according to studies by the National Safety Council.

Lurking here beneath the manhole covers is an insidious force field of gases such as hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of human waste, which can overcome and comatize a man as quickly as a highly poisonous snake bite.

There are precarious levels of carbon monoxide and methane that can ignite a deadly explosion at the strike of a match--gases so strong they can suck the oxygen from your lungs or eat clean through metal manhole steps.

For McCormick, working underground in the city’s sewer system is one of the most responsible jobs he can imagine. Men and women risk their lives to protect the public and the environment from the poisons of hazardous waste.

Still, he is often too embarrassed to tell people at dinner parties what he does for a living, fearing that such talk of human waste treatment will taint the delicate social moment and somehow render him unclean in others’ eyes.

Doctors command admiration for their surgery, he reasons. Carpenters inspire awe for their handiwork. Well, McCormick believes, it’s about time sewer workers got a little grudging respect of their own.

The average person, he says, has little concept of what happens to the water once they wash their hands or flush the toilet:

“That water goes on an incredible underground journey, sometimes 40 miles or more, to reach the nearest treatment plant. Sometimes, the trip can take 12 hours or more through pipes and conduits that have to be maintained by people like us. We have to make sure that none of that poison water comes back to hurt people or ruin their environment.

“It’s a tough job. But people don’t respect us for what we do. They figure that once they flush their toilets that it’s a solved problem. It’s forgotten. But everything that goes down that drain, we have to deal with it. Nobody ever calls us to say ‘Hey, you guys do a good job down there.’ We only hear from them when the mess backs up into their living rooms.”

In recent years, cities such as Los Angeles have tried to reverse the soiled stigma of sewer work. Workers consider themselves underground professionals--the city’s own plumbing force--schooled in using equipment to detect and handle dangerous gases.

They’re no longer--even jokingly--referred to as “sewer rats,” as in years past. Now they’re wastewater-collection workers.

Also long gone are the reckless, cowboy days when unskilled workers were sent regularly into the sewers without proper equipment, walking through them at night, checking lines, looking for clogs and taking boat rides along the underground river of sludge.

Modern sewer work uses such sophisticated equipment as sonar devices and meters that measure the presence of noxious gas, as well as subterranean cameras that relay trouble spots to the surface, significantly lessening the time workers spend underground.

Instead, they often stand outside manholes along busy streets, using giant Roto-Rooter-type machines or high-velocity streams of water to power through blockages and giant fans to blow away troublesome gases.

When they do venture below, the workers wear protective equipment such as gloves, goggles and hip boots. Soon, safety standards for such confined-space work may require workers to don protective gas masks at all times.

Such precautions are necessary, officials say. In 1992, at least a dozen sewer workers were killed nationwide in on-the-job accidents--up from one in 1989, according to a survey of more than 650 sewer districts by the Water Environment Federation, a professional educational association for environmental workers.

Another 2,874 injuries were reported last year, ranging from infections to broken legs and back strain. That number is also up from the 2,406 injuries reported in 1989, the next-most-recent year such a study was conducted.

While the sewer industry has strived to improve conditions, researchers say, fatal accidents often involve more than one worker, which boosts the death toll.

In 1980, two Los Angeles-area sewer workers were overcome by hydrogen sulfide in a Burbank water-reclamation-plant manhole after week-old sewage was pumped through the line in which they were working.

One by one, after the first person succumbed to the toxic gas, fellow workers went down into the manhole to attempt a rescue--each themselves losing consciousness. Finally, four men were pulled from the hole. Two were dead. The men who died at the Burbank plant had earlier complained about the routine violation of safety procedures there. The facility’s superintendent was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter in connection with the mishap and sentenced to community service.

Now, workers do not enter sewers unless they are affixed to a tether, which can be used to reel them back to the surface in an emergency.

Still, says Greg White, municipal programs director for the Water Environment Federation, accidents occur “all the time in the sewers. They’re like lemmings, these workers who go down into these dangerous situations trying to pull off some amazing rescue, like they were immune to the toxic gas themselves.”

Despite a new image and safety measures, Robert Potter still feels like a sewer rat.

The 27-year-old is a member of the Wastewater Collection Division’s confined-space entry team, an elite crew of 16 men who venture into the most dangerous sewers or storm drains.

They know the best time to go down is after midnight when water usage is low and the effluent flow is at its weakest--certainly not during morning and evening hours when the river can become a waist-high torrent.

They’ve learned to stand clear when pulling open a 250-pound manhole cover because the gaseous stench can rise up and strangle your throat like a dose of Mace. They know that after years of crawling and shimmying through sewer lines, some of their ranks get sick from claustrophobia and the ever-present fear of a cave-in if old pipes collapse.

Many workers also worry that the city’s sewer capacity will not keep up with its runaway development, that someday soon the conduits in which they work will swell chock-full.

As a result, they follow one key rule: Enter manholes with caution. Because you never know what you might find below.

Potter once encountered a clogged 20-inch-wide storm drain crawling with cockroaches. After another worker skittishly refused to climb inside, Potter went to work cleaning the pipe. The bugs, he recalls, were everywhere--in his eyes, down his shirt.

“Sure, it was creepy,” he says. “I was afraid the first time. But now I do stuff like that almost every day. Heck, they’re just insects. I mean, if you think about it, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

After a strong rain, the dank sewers and storm drains become the domain of foot-long tree rats so bold they can snarl at and attack a man if cornered. Workers have come face to face with pythons, spiders and creatures they can’t even identify.

“Most things die down here before they can hurt you,” Potter explains. “Because the atmosphere in the sewers is not conducive to life.”

In many ways, the sewer has become an underground urban junkyard. Workers can often identify a neighborhood by what they discover in its sewage. Syringes, rubber gloves, hypodermic needles and soiled linens, for example, usually indicate that a hospital is nearby. Grease usually means a restaurant.

In residential storm drains, they have found tree stumps, abandoned motorcycles, shotguns, pistols, live mortar rounds, drugs and pornographic films. They’ve stumbled across dead cats and dogs, truck tires, mattresses, couches, chairs, rusty razor blades, bowling balls, dentures and diamond rings--even a butchered cow.

And, of course, the kitchen sink.

Workers shudder when entering a sewer near industrial plants, never knowing what caustic chemicals might have been illegally dumped down the drain.

About the only thing L. A. workers have never encountered are live alligators--a commonly repeated legend--but they wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

“People think that as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind,” Potter says of the refuse. “That might be true for them. But when they dump things into the sewers, they often end up on our laps.”

On a recent tour of a San Fernando Valley storm drain, Potter and a crew of three walked slowly, one foot in front of the other, as they splashed through the tiny stream of runoff, their flashlight beams dancing only a few feet ahead.

From somewhere above, they could hear the clump-clump of cars speeding over manhole covers. As they crouched along inside the curving 5-foot-high pipe, they found crudely made torches that teens use to explore the caverns and build forts in the darkness.

Unlike the closed sewers, a breeze constantly blows in the open-ended storm drains, cooling them in hot summer months. A full half-mile inside the pipe, the walls still sported graffiti: “For a good time, call Brenda.”

The men tell how sewer workers play tricks on jumpy comrades in the darkness, rapping their boots with a stick as though a snake had slithered by.

Potter likes his work and thrives on the challenge. Like many workers here, he didn’t expect to work inside sewer pipes when he applied for a job in waste-water management.

But he and his colleagues know their places are here below ground. Sure, they’d like to make more than a $25,000 annual salary. But the money, like the respect, comes slowly.

“I mean, look at domestic plumbers--they can charge $100 an hour on weekends and they just work with these little pipes,” says Carl Scott, a five-year veteran. “We work with some major pipes, man, but the money’s not there.”

These days, John McCormick doesn’t go down into the sewers as much as before. Now he’s a training supervisor, sort of a drill sergeant for sewer workers.

But when he goes below, those same butterflies return. He thinks about the time the old lady used her high-heeled shoe to beat back a rat that had climbed out of her toilet. Or the python he once killed in the sewer, only to be told by an angry homeowner the snake was her long-lost pet.

In the end, though, the sewers have been good to him, Potter and Scott. A hard day’s work beneath city streets brings a sense of satisfaction.

But there’s one thing they never get used to, no matter how long they’ve been down under.

“It’s those toilets, man,” Scott says. “It’s kind of scary to hear them flush. You wonder whether people on the surface realize that there’s people like us down here, waiting for what comes down the pike.”