When Water Goes From Flush to Fish

Fish can be pets. Fish can be dinner. But the fish raised at the Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant are pride--the pride of men who each day clean 18 million gallons of Howard County sewage.

Recently, five of those men gathered by the shores of the Little Patuxent River to return three bluegills, two river chubs, a sunfish and one omnivorous catfish to their native waters--after a year of easy living in water flushed down 250,000 toilets.

Demonstrating the cleaning powers of modern sewage treatment plants is something of an obsession for those who work there.

At the Little Patuxent plant in Savage, workers proudly display about 40 river creatures in a 200-gallon aquarium in the lobby. Pipes keep the tank filled with a constant flow of effluent--the cleaned, disinfected output of the plant.

The fish that were set free were the largest and most aggressive of the tank’s inhabitants. They might still be there had it not been for the unruly appetite of the catfish, which recently made a snack of the tank’s lone crawfish.

“He was getting like a velociraptor attitude,” Edward Bowley, a plant operator and head fish-keeper, said sadly.

“It’s good to release something that we’ve seen grown,” says plant operator Alex Williams.

Adds co-worker Kenney Manning, “It means our job really means something to someone.”

Such projects are common at sewage plants--these days dubbed “waste-water treatment facilities” or “water reclamation plants” by a profession intent on cleaning up its image.

A plant manager in Concord, N.H., once handed out bricks of dried sludge to City Council members at a budget meeting.

At the Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority plant in northern Virginia, tour guides will sometimes drink a glass of effluent. Sometimes especially enthusiastic members of tour groups join in.

“Several years ago, we had the members of our General Assembly over. And they wanted to partake,” said executive director Millard H. Robbins Jr., who called the taste of his plant’s product “fairly flat.”

The effluent at the Little Patuxent plant--dubbed “cleaner than Perrier” by former shift supervisor Kenneth R. Ham--has proven good enough for the discriminating gills in Savage.

Workers have spent years collecting fish from the Little Patuxent to stock their lobby aquarium. Workers feed them daily a mix of flakes, worms, grasshoppers and freeze-dried shrimp.

About 30 fish--including freshwater clams, river eels, snails and lots of chubs and bluegills--have become semi-permanent inhabitants of the aquarium in the plant’s lobby. They are a favorite of tour groups, particularly schoolchildren.

“The life cycle of the river,” Bowley said, “a lot of it’s in that tank.”

And judging from the recent release ceremony, only the big ones get away.

The day before the release, Bowley fished the largest and most troublesome of his finned friends from the tank. He wanted them to spend a day in a bucket full of river water--which Bowley said is dirtier than the plant’s effluent--to help them adjust.

The day of the release, Bowley, dressed in a blue hard hat, rubber waders and a work shirt that says “Ed,” wandered out to the middle of the river for the ceremonial dumping of the white bucket.

With a plop-plop, a plop-plop and a final plop-plop-plop, the fish slipped into the water. Most quickly swam away, but the catfish acted briefly skittish and turned pale--by catfish standards--before darting under a nearby rock.

“Well, there’s a little stress,” says shift supervisor Bill Holland, observing from the shore. “They’re going, ‘Am I going in a river, or am I going on a grill?’ ”

Though they might end up on a dinner plate downriver as the Little Patuxent heads to the Chesapeake Bay, the fish at least are safe from the hooks of the plant’s workers.

“I would eat them if I had to,” said Manning, standing on shore. “But I wouldn’t eat them because I’ve grown attached. I’m sure they’re fine eating.”