Hazard Level: 9

Now, back to the first manhole room and into the side tunnel. This tunnel is also made of cement, but seems much cleaner than the main tunnel. It also seems to go on for ever. This is a great place to turn off your light and walk in the darkness. The tunnel will eventualy come to a junction/manhole room with two side tunnels on the right wall. The tunnel continues on but at a 45 degree angle to the right on the opposite wall. This section goes for maybe a couple hundred feet then comes to another manhole room. At this manhole room, the tunnel turns about 45 degrees to the left and continues strait for a while then begins to make a gradual turn to the right. Near the end of this turn, the water begins to deepen until it fills half to a quarter of the tunnel. An aboveground referance point for this area is the manhole at the intersection of Kenduskeg Ave and Harlow st. The curved deep water section of tunnel eventualy ends at the bottom of a steeply inclining section of tunnel which follows under Kenduskeag ave to the top of the hill, then levels off. Sometime after it levels off at the top of the hill, there is a strange area where roots have come into the tunnel and built up into huge masses that look like they could come alive and devoure small animals. We stopped and turned back somewhere just after that area because we had forgotten to bring drinking water, and we now seemed to be in a line with more sewage flowing through. It had been a while since we had past a manhole cover of any sort and our lights revealed nothing of the sort ahead of us. running into a pocket of methane and other gases was what we were most worried about in this section.

Going back to the first junction/manhole room in the first branch and taking a look at the two side passages... Some of the times we have been in here there has been a very bad smell which seemed to come from these two side tunnels, but other times it had the same sort of smell as the rest of the drain. One of the side passages sits directly atop the other, about three to five feet apart, and both are large enough to crawl into and turn around. Looking into the lower one we could see that it went in purhaps five feet before going strait up and into the side tunnel directly above it. The upper side tunnel goes in about eight to ten feet. About halfway through there is a hole in the floor of the tunnel that goes down to the lower side tunnel. At the other end of the upper side tunnel is another manhole room. In this one the manhole is fairly close above. This room is at the right end of a long smallish tunnel, smaller than the others we have found in this drain. The tunnel seems to run parallel to the second tunnel section of the first branch from the main tunnel. The water in here does not run out of the room through the tunnel between here and the first branch, instead it flows under a large metal plate on one wall and can be heard falling for some distance a short ways past that. We did not venture far into this section of tunnel as it was a fairly small pipe and we suspect that it is likely to be sewage (dark grey water) and the water was fairly deep at the time.

Back into the main tunnel and up to the next branch... This cement tunnel is in rather poor condition. Our agents avoided this side passage on earlier expeditions into the PO Drain because it looked like it could collapse. Several feet into the side passage there is a hole in the ceiling with several large pieces of jagged rebar protruding at odd angles, the floor below is littered with rubble from the slight collapse. In our opinion, this is the more interesting tunnels in the PO Drain. There is no water running through this tunnel but it is very damp, not like the other tunnels in PO Drain which had dry walls with a stream of water in the middle.. this one was just damp, with areas of yellow and white fungus resembling sea fans growing flat on the walls. The tunnel seemed to slope in the wrong direction for water to flow out from it. In one section there are small, three to five inch diameter pipes pointing down but not protruding from the ceiling. Several hundred feet in the tunnel is completely collapsed. Just a couple feet in front of the cave in, a PVC/plastic pipe crosses the tunnel, filling about half of it.