Cooum, the sewage river of Chennai, saw a more or less cleansed state in November 2015 after the Chennai floods. It was a much needed sparkling picture, after years and years of watching Cooum get polluted. When one could not even go near the river without holding his/her nose, it was astonishing to see a clean Cooum. What the government had been doing in order to clean up the river for years, the rain did it in just a few days.

However, the clean state of Cooum was very brief. It was not long, after which it started getting uglier again. So this leads us to the question, why can’t Cooum stay clean for a longer time? What really happens to our city’s poop? Are they both somehow correlated to each other? In an Analysis by The News Minute, the entire process of Chennai’s sewage treatment has been explained in detail:

Flushed down the toilet:

It may be the end for your constipation issues, but the journey has just started for your poop once it gets flushed. The poop gets carried down into the sewers to the nearest manhole available. Manholes are available every 100 ft in Chennai and it can hold varying amounts of sewage. The volume that can be held depends on the area and the population there; an area with an apartment will have manholes with a larger capacity.

From the manholes, the poop gets carried through sewer lines to sewage pumping stations. In Chennai, there are 250 sewage pumping stations available.