Posting up some older stuff from when I first started exploring.
This set was mainly for a photography art class I took back in 2011. The assignment was a photo narrative. In other words we were supposed to try and tell a story using pictures. These were taken with a point and shoot handheld before I got my first real camera but here they are. Without any further adieu the scene is south side Columbus, Ohio. On a casual walkabout one afternoon I found a bunch of containers near an old industrial site (which has since been demolished).
Instantly intrigued, I began to look around and noticed that some of the barrels were haphazardly overturned and the contents had long since leaked into the natural vegetation that was adjacent to the site. Interestingly enough there was a drainage grate/manhole right next to the drums.
I wasn't having much luck opening the grate as it was bolted down so I began trying to figure out where the hell it went and why it was practically in the middle of some woods. I whipped out my phone and with the help of google maps along with the City of Columbus's CSO overflow website and a generous amount of wandering around I found what appeared to be a service hatch.
After a bit of voodoo magic the hatch was passable and I began my first documented tunnel explore. After descending down into the hatch I found myself on a sort of balcony with some odd electrical wires, mechanical screws, and a lot of mounting holes for measurement instruments that were no longer located in the underground room.
A portion of the floor of the balcony consisted of a grate filled with straight nasty. Over the edge of the balcony on one side was a rather fast moving stream of wastewater and on the other side was a dry drop box. The two sides were separated by a half concrete and half wooden weir.
At the time of this explore I was unaware but retroactively speaking I was in a CSO (combined sewer overflow) junction room. Long story short is that when it rains heavily in Columbus the sewers are infiltrated by stormwater and the downstream sewage plants (in this case Jackson Pike and Southerly) cannot handle the extra flow. In lieu of the sewers backing up into peoples homes and basements the city retrofitted the old style sewers with overflow points to outfall into the river instead. This was one such point.
0930_03_HydrolicModeling_DeepTunnel.pdf Sauce:EMH&T
https://drive.goog...M/edit?usp=sharing Now in my quest to find the original manhole that the barrels were situated by I decided to descend from the balcony into the dry dropbox to follow the pipe back to my above ground location. A word of warning to other novice explorers: It isn't the best idea to start upstream in a tunnel if you do not know where it leads as you could easily find yourself SOL if conditions turn ugly. Also do not rely on rusty steel rungs to ascend or decent underground.
Anyways I had foolishly decided the steel rungs would be plenty strong enough to hold my body weight as I climbed over the edge of the balcony into the dropbox and needless to say I found myself at the bottom much sooner than I had anticipated after breaking two of the rungs simultaneously. At the bottom of the box I contemplated my dilemma as I had not only broken two of the more essential rungs at the top of the ladder but noticed that 4 of the rungs at the bottom were already missing and now I had no way back up.
So faced with only one direction of travel left and already burning straight adrenaline I began down the tunnel. The tunnel was actually pretty windy for some reason and the air was filled with suspended particles and water vapor.
Eventually I reached a manhole cover identical to the one I had found on the surface but it did not have my marker (in this case a stick) so I continued on until 2 or 3 manhole grates later I found my marker and snapped a picture.
Remembering that the manhole covers were bolted shut I was again forced to continue my push to the end of the tunnel which awaited me a few hundred meters downstream.
After reluctantly exiting the tunnel outfall I snapped a few more pictures of the CSO sign and a dude fishing near the outfall.
Still thankful for making it out alive I began my quest back to my car through the woods and through sheer chance happened across a bumcamp on an abandoned road. Got a few more pictures before I ran into anyone who didn't want me there and quickly made my way back home.
So concludes the story of my first draining adventure. Not much in retrospect in terms of, well, really anything but it was a pretty decent starting point. I learned a lot about what not to do as well as how I would have to change the way I took photos and even research locations before diving in. I hope you enjoyed this write up and if you're new to exploring I hope you gained a bit of practical knowledge and learned through my experience.
Also thought I'd post some night pictures of when I went back to the bumcamp bridge, even though this is the PDB.
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