SEPTA’s war on grime

When the “package” was spotted about midnight, members of a SEPTA wash-down crew sprinted up two flights of stairs to assess the threat.

A pile of human waste was tucked in a corner and spattered on a blue-tiled wall in the westbound entrance of the Fifth Street/Independence Hall station on the Market-Frankford Line. Biohazard! A splash of bleach, a blast from a high-pressure hose, and the mess was obliterated.

While Philadelphia sleeps, or does whatever it does, SEPTA’s overnight wash-down crews are on the move, attacking until dawn the accumulated grime, disgusting substances, trash, and foul odors of the city’s transit rail stations — war without end.

“We’ll go home, and by this afternoon, it’ll be messed up all over again,” said Jacques Brissault, the Central Zone station manager, responsible for deep cleaners at eight stations.

Although they wouldn’t describe themselves that way, the cleaners are unheralded heroes, fighting the good fight from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. Sunday through Thursday.

Late on a recent Wednesday, Washdown D-Crew caught an eastbound Market-Frankford Line train at 34th Street, the zone headquarters, after the nightly briefing. Six men stared into the tunnel searching for the light like all commuters.

On the surface at Fifth and Market Streets, Carlysle Price wrenched open a fire hydrant and attached a hose to a trailer-mounted tank that heated the water to 220 degrees. Boosted by a pump, it roars from the washer nozzle at 3,500 pounds per square inch — or more than 60 times the pressure of a kitchen faucet.

“Appreciate the work!”

Down in the station, Briheem Jones and Tyron Wood, three weeks on the job and starting his field training, scrubbed tile walls with concentrated Simple Green cleaner and degreaser mixed in mop bucks, a process known as “lacing” (the soap suds look like lace). Price followed with the hose for a rinse cycle.

“I could do this all night. It’s like a third arm,” Price, 33, said, patting the nozzle. Pressurized water howled in the enclosed space like a straight-line wind in a thunderstorm.

“I love watching the walls turn clean after the rinse; they look new again,” he said.

Jones, 34, was scrubbing next to Wood and complimented the trainee on how well he scoured the station’s pillars.

“It ain’t hard as long as you follow directions,” Wood, 31, said.

“That’s all it takes,” agreed Jones.

A man wearing a fedora and a white dress shirt, moving through the turnstiles to grab the last train of the day, called out to the team: “Appreciate the work!” Jones and Wood shouted their thanks.

By the end of the shift, about 1,800 gallons of water were expended to power wash the whole station.

Brake dust from the trains screeching in and out all day accumulates on the walls, Brissault explained, along with old dirt and pollen that blows through the tunnels. Then there’s trash, urine, and excrement, which the cleaners call “presents” or “packages,” he said. No sense using crude words for a crude reality.

People hate dirty transit. Unclean stations regularly rank at or near the top of complaints in rider surveys and reports to SEPTA customer service, along with smoking and antisocial behavior. All seem worse since the pandemic, officials say.

Crews aim to deep clean each station twice a month. That’s on top of regular custodial day and evening shifts. Roving cleaners spray down station entrances and exits during the day. Soil blows in, coating surfaces and giving that earthy smell.

“We’re looking to get it to the point where we can have water somewhere on every station every shift,” said Kevin Clark, assistant director of custodial services for SEPTA, where he’s worked for 16 years. Clark started as a cleaner and worked his way up.

The transit agency has begun hiring 100 more cleaners to boost the force to 350 people. Custodians, represented by Transit Workers Union Local 234 earn $18.62 to $26.20 an hour, plus overtime. Benefits include a pension. While the crew that night was all-male, 23% of cleaners are women.

More bodies equal more frequent cleaning and, perhaps, getting ahead of the grime.

In this crew’s territory, the toughest to clean are 15th Street Station, a large hub; 13th Street Station, and Eighth Street Station at Market Street. They’re heavily trafficked and have more stains and trash than most. Overnight cleaners also often deal with encampments of homeless people and drug users.

“There were creepy crawly things in the clothes, moving around.”

Cleaners call 15th Street the “marketplace,” a bazaar of commerce: both illegal drugs and goods and services, where some even cut people’s hair in the concourses.

“They’re super organized,” Clark said. “You have some members of the population that enforce cleanliness. They’ll see us coming and snap at others for being in the way. Like, ‘Yo, get up. We need the cleaners.’”

Price recalled a night when authorities cleared their work area, scattering people, who left behind hundreds of needles and piles of belongings. The cleaners put on extra layers and gloves, dropping the needles into sharps containers, he said.

“We double-bagged personal stuff just to be safe,” Price said. “There were creepy crawly things in the clothes, moving around.”

He called the moving bugs the grossest thing he’s seen.

Built in 1908, Fifth Street/Independence Hall was refurbished in a two-year $20 million project, emerging in summer 2020 as a tourist showpiece, with red-white-and-blue tiles and murals of historical figures.

Still, a surprising amount of dirt rolled off the surfaces. It cascaded from the top to the bottom of the station, pulled by gravity, becoming small rivers of dirty water that rushed into gutters and drains.

Trash seemed to bubble up, ending as a beached, sodden heap on the platform: smashed cigarettes, airline-sized vodka bottles, coffee cups, hoagie wrappers, gum, scraps of paper.

At one end of the platform, Sha’neef Jackson worked an industrial buffer that pumped a mixture of hot water and Purple brand degreaser.

“This is the lawn mower,” said Jackson, 29, a cleaner for two years. “It gets at the deep stains.”

Finally, they used squeegees and mops to create a waterfall that sent the detritus over the edge. Liquids gurgled down drains. Track crews would be by later to vacuum up the solid trash.

The crew left behind a clean well-lighted place, at least for a while.