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The Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain


Drain type: Obnoxious New Municipal Drain
Year: 1996?
Region: Commercial suburbia
Drain accessibility: A very cool and very ninja walk on top of a concrete wall over an open reservoir. Entertaining but not impossible.
Drain exitability: The MANWHORE has thick, heavy manholes you'd be hard-pressed to pop subside. Count on leaving the way you came in; but hey, it's a short drain.
Traversability: The entrance tunnel is quite large for an Obnoxious New Municipal Drain, but the tunnels between manhole chambers do get smaller as you go. They aren't entirely unforgiving, though, and you won't end up on all fours, but expect a killer cramp in the morning.
Interesting features: The MANWHORE features the always-exciting clanging valve-opening sound of cars driving over the manholes. There's some neat flowstone here and there, bleeding walls, rust-and-other-crap-filled water, the odd mineral stalactite, and a big wading pool at the end. Also, there's not much oxygen. Hallucinatastic!
Hazards: Pace yourself. The oxygen deprivation isn't lethal but with more than three people in your party it'll start to hit you pretty hard by the time you reach the end. Take it easy, move slowly, take rests. Try not to get the mushy-rust stalactites in your hair, and don't die trying to get into the entrance.
Recommendation: If you're the crouching-through-wet-municipal-RCPs type, or just determined to do every drain in Barrie, the Manwhore is a fun evening's outing, though it's not particularly long. Its sister drain (the one pouring out of the smaller pipe next to the MANWHORE's entrance) is small and nasty all the way through as far as we can tell. Don't bother with that one, unless you REALLY want to...


Fj33r. The MANWHORE chambers don't seem this big when you're in them.


The Photographic Return to the MANWHORE
September 18th, 2001

Well, we recently led a return expedition to The Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain. Myself, Asher, Sema4, Efferfax, Krall and Grebin were on the journey, and we actually managed to escape the drain from its end this time (in previous visits we had to go out the way we came).
All in all, as far as the MANWHORE goes, it was a succesful expedition and we have more photographs of the MANWHORE now than we do of any other (probably far more interesting) places. I mean, come on, we have three photos from Michigan Central Station, and twenty-one from a municipal drain less than a kilometer long.
Aw well. Such things will be rectified in future.
And now, the photograph-oriented MANWHORE expedition!


Asher stayed topside while the rest of us scurried down to the reservoir. Here, I've managed to fantastically fail to show the fact that Sema4 is standing on a tiny ledge fifteen feet over the water.


As we prepare to enter the enigmatic pipes, Krall is stepping onto the central concrete wall from which we will be entering the drain, while Efferfax contemplates a possible watery demise. Again, we were quite high up here, and on a narrow ledge, but I completely forgot to take any photos that reflect this fact.


Inside the drain. This is near the end of the entrance pipe, the largest pipe in the drain. Efferfax steps into the first chamber while Krall does some subterranean calisthenics.


A brief, controversial glimpse of the rare animal known as a "drainer". Has this blurry, dark image been doctored to include this mystery of nature, or is it possible that the photographer actually had an encounter with this fascinating beast?


"Shhhh..."


Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink. You could probably eat a slice of it, though.


A metal balcony under a manhole. I love these things.


And so does Sema4.


Efferfax standing next to a high-up PVC pipe in one of the chambers around the middle of the drain. I'll save you the trouble of averaging and sharpening the facial pixellation and tell you right off that he looks like a cross-eyed twit in this photo. It's really quite hilarious.


Next, we crossed the dreaded River of Bile.


Yuck...


Sema4 tries not to inhale any of whatever mysterious substance is causing the walls to bleed.


No, really, it's just a flesh wound...


The end of the drain! Fjeer the green wading pool. I bet with a heater and some jets it'd be a nice sauna. This is looking out of the main pipe, and there's a ladder going up to a manhole on the left, which we'd never popped before...


*clang* "Is Grebin alright?" "Grebin, are you alright?" "----!" "What'd he say?" "He said it's open!" "It's open?" "What?" "He says Grebin opened it!" "It's open?" "I don't know! Grebin, is it open?"


Yes, yes, thank you, Grebin. It's open.


Aaaack! This is one of our scariest photos, although the pixellation does take the edge off. Sema4 escapes happily...


With Krall in hot pursuit.


I can't believe my bangs screwed up this shot. This is why I got a haircut, okay? At any rate, fjeer Krall. We were all suffering minor oxygen deprivation right now, to the point that Efferfax was beginning to panic about how badly his hands were tingling, which may explain why Krall is climbing this ladder in such a goofy manner.


And finally, having lost radio contact with Asher, our extensive search turns her up. Sema4 got lost, though, and I am invisible.

Woot! Those of you who need to know the nitty-gritty of the MANWHORE's exploration and background, read on, but there's no more pretty pictures to see, I fear.
In conclusion, don't do the MANWHORE.
- FlameOut


That Thing With The Grill and The Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain
Discovering the Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain was the result of a very long afternoon marching around my area, during which any drains we'd found were generally flooded enough to be untraversable due to the melting snow.
It was, basically, a bad day for drains.
Nonetheless we'd tried to make the day interesting for ourselves, popping manholes, playing with cable cans, stealing medium-duty scrubbing sponges from a janitor's closet at a nearby elementary school and other such good things.
My accompaniment on this little romp consisted of Asher and Grebin initially, but Dain Bramaged was later added when he wouldn't let us leave his house without him. The four of us went to check out a drain I'd been to before near his place, but which I hadn't entered on account of it being quite firmly locked up (I was equipped, this time, to deal with it).
When we arrived we found that it, like most others we'd found that afternoon, was running deep and fast, and one could barely get a solid footing on the concrete blocks out in front of the entrance. Examination of the drain through the grill, though, revealed something disappointing: it seemed this drain simply ran to the other side of the road -- we could see daylight at the other end.
Happily, Dain Bramaged and I recalled a large circular grill set in the ground on the other side of the road, in an area that was completely fenced-off. We hopped the fence around a large culvert on our side of the road and used it to enter the much-more-difficultly-fenced-off side, and proceeded to examine the aforementioned grill.
One section of this grill was meant to open outwards to allow access to what lay beneath, but it had been locked down. If one was to open this section they could reach a valve control of some sort, and/or drop several feet onto a metal balcony. Hopefully at some point I'll have pictures of this.
At any rate, Grebin's unorthodox (and frankly bizarre) method of approaching anything heavily-locked (which generally seemed to involve knocking pins out of hinges, or gauging just how much weight any specific weld could take) led him to take a crowbar to the opposite side of the grill, where there were little metal clamps holding the back side of the grill to a metal bar beneath, fastened with some heavy and immovable screws.
He proceeded to force these things out of shape then move them away from the metal bar they were clamped under, until the entire back section of the grill was no longer fastened to anything.
What we hadn't counted on was this section weighing hundreds of pounds. However, between Grebin and I we did manage to get it lifted and flipped back onto the ground behind it with a minimal fiasco factor. We now had access to a ladder going down to the metal balcony and beyond (here's a wee question: the only way to access this ladder from the top is to open the part of the grill that's not meant to be opened?). Predictably Grebin and I entered to explore our surroundings.
The room we entered was essentially a slightly-larger-than-usual manhole chamber. The valve control seemed to shut off a drain entering this chamber from the side -- I'm not sure why one would wish to do so. However, it seemed that our inital evaluation of this drain had been correct: every exit from this chamber had daylight not too far away, and one was too small to comfortably traverse.
As such we hauled our collective ass out of the chamber and, with a dozen suburban families now devotedly watching our little show from their houses no more than two hundred feet away, we closed the grill again (which for some reason took all four of us), realized that with the metal clamps knocked out of place it wouldn't entirely close, decided that would have to do, hopped the fence and ran away.
Oh well.
The rest of the night found some things that may be worth investigating another day, and also plunged us ankle-deep in thick wet clay when we attempted to access a construction zone that proved to be very, very boring.
Finally, though, we found the reservoir. This was a huge, deep area with steep hills and high fences all around it. While Asher busied herself peering down manholes on the road and (I am given to believing) trying to get herself run over, the rest of us clambered over the fence and skidded our way down to the reservoir.
Again, hopefully, pictures to come.
The reservoir was poured into by two large pipes, one larger than the other. These were about two feet above a concrete floor which was submerged in deep, rushing water. The actual pipe area was fenced off on three sides; so naturally, we held onto the fence on one side to swing ourselves around to the inside, then use it to stabilize ourselves as we crabwalked across the narrow concrete wall it was built on, six feet over the reservoir waters.
There was a second concrete wall running across the pipe area with a gap in the bottom to allow water to flow under it. I honestly don't know what it was there for but it did simplify the process of getting to the pipes -- we were able to let go of the fence, hop onto this wall and walk very slowly and with no small measure of panic to a point where one could either crawl, feet-first, very slowly and dangerously onto the pipe which protruded furthest, or actually take the three-foot standing jump that any healthy human being ought to be able to pull off. Grebin and I opted for the former.
Grebin made it across first, took a flashlight from us and swung himself down into the larger of the pipes. He disappeared for about a minute then came back and told us that it was, in fact, a very cool drain.
We were overjoyed with the news and went to fetch Asher. Once she had enlisted Grebin's aid to get over the fence (Asher, we should know, is 5'3"), we all managed in various scary and slippery ways to enter the large pipe.
Once we were all inside we gauged our surroundings. It was a very new drain, built in 1999, and the pipe we were standing in must have been about 5'6" high. I was stooping considerably, but in the center Asher could stand up straight.
We made our way into the drain as we were wont to do, seeing what we could see. Grebin at one point attempted to pop a manhole subside but had no luck. The first manhole chamber we came to had some very cool flowstone formations, and the tunnel walls occasionally seemed to "bleed" (this seemed to be from minerals in the soil leaching through very small holes or fractures in the tunnel walls -- the effect was quite dramatic and very cool. Pictures soon?). None of the manholes we found actually had any holes so it occurred to us, once we were a few hundred metres into the drain, that our only oxygen was coming from the entrance.
At one point Grebin decided to light his propane lamp, which we were all happily able to talk him out of. He went to put the lamp away, but after he'd unscrewed the propane tank I could very clearly smell the stuff. I put the tank to my ear and heard hissing -- the tank's seal had broken. Well, hooray.
We considered our options while we filled the low-oxygen atmosphere with complex hydrocarbons, and finally decided to put the lamp away with the tank attached.
From here we quickly moved on our way down the drain.
There were some cool things to see and, again, I hope I can have pictures up sometime. The tunnels did become smaller as we walked and couldn't have been more than 5'0" to 4'10" by the end of the drain.
The end, incidentally, was a large manhole chamber with a sunken floor totally submerged in about two feet of water, and a ladder going up to a featureless black iron disk. (Dain Bramaged later informed me he saw something topside that looked very much like this type of manhole, and had two handles on the top. From this we can assume that this cover wasn't bolted or anything scary of the sort, so we may try to pop it sometime to find where this drain ends.)
Also worth noting is the fact that for a long time in this drain we were becoming increasingly convinced that it was not, in fact, a drain. That is to say, it certainly didn't smell like sewage, but the stuff we were walking through looked for all the world (to be blunt) like processed shit. There were clumps and scales of things floating on the water and the overall effect was quite disgusting -- however, we never actually saw any coherent piece of sewage so we continued on our way.
The "sewage" effect got worse as we walked until we reached the source: a side-drain pouring a thick cocktail of mud, rust and god-knows-what-else into the drain. We assumed it was located in a construction site somewhere. Beyond this drain the water returns to its mildly-less-offensive light grey shade. (No, not sewage grey. I promise.)
Oxygen deprivation could be a problem if you spent way too long in here, as by the time we had turned around and were heading for the entrance we were stopping for breath at every manhole chamber. Of course, it gets better as you near the entrance.
Getting out of the drain is a bit of a ridiculous thing, involving reaching around to the pipe beside it, hauling yourself between the two of them, lifting yourself as high as you can and throwing your leg over one of the drains then trying desperately to fall on one of them. It's bizarre, but it's possible. We did learn, however, that there may be a minimum height requirement for this: I'd recommend if you're under 5'10" you bring someone of greater stature to aid you in escaping the drain.
Our real conundrum was naming this drain, as it had so many irresistable features that would make fantastic names: flowstone, bleeding walls, the rust-sewage effect, the big wading pool at its end, the incident with the propane, the fact that it's completely untagged -- but Asher proposed, in a fit of one thing or another, that it be called the Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain, and I suppose that's as good as it gets.
At any rate, the MANWHORE is a fun hour's trip and if you want to check it out yourself just let me know.
We didn't take any pictures on our journey, but intend to return to do so.
-Flame0ut

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