WATCH: Kids asked Christen, "How can you stand the smell of wastewater?"

How can wastewater treatment plant workers spend hours around sewage and not get overwhelmed by the smell? Former Treatment Plant Operator and current manager Christen Wood gets that question a lot, and she said it's all science.

VIDEO: @Sewer_Chic's report from our Southerly plant shows there are no holidays off

Your toilet can't take an extended holiday. Which is one of many reasons our shift workers like Christen don't either.

Christen Wood is an Operator at our Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant and she was working on Thanksgiving with a number of her colleagues. She sent us this video after dinner, not only thanking her own family and co-workers who live the shift life, but thanking you, our customers.

We're proud to serve you all year long, holidays, weekends and snow days included.

RELATED STORIES:

• WATCH: Check out all of our Quick Clips videos
• PERISCOPE: We periscoped 5 quick questions with Christen
• HOLIDAYS: Wastewater doesn't take a holiday

WATCH: The not-so-terrifying but very creepy-cool tunnels deep under Southerly / #h2olloween

Some of the access tunnels in the bowels of the Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant in Cuyahoga Heights date back to the plant's grand opening in 1928.

Operator Christen Wood took us for a quick tour of the sprawling and sometimes spooky underground system, just in time for Halloween.

WATCH: More than words, Christen captures our love for clean water perfectly. #LoveCleanWater

Related stories:

• VALENTINES: Print and send your own #LoveCleanWater valentines
• READ: Read our love letter to water
• PICS: I found love at a wastewater treatment plant
• WATCH: Catch all of our one-minute-or-less Quick Clips

VIDEO: Whether you watch "Glee" or not, the irony here has got to make you laugh.

You never know what will make it through the sewers and into one of our three treatment plants.

And every wastewater plant operator has a story to tell. When we asked Southerly Wastewater Plant Operator in Training Christen Wood what was the weirdest thing she's seen, here's what she said.



You might laugh, "Glee DVDs in the sewer?"

Whether you like the show or not, it's not likely that someone "flushed" them. Most often, things like this start in the trash and somehow make it to the curb in a combined-sewer neighborhood (where stormwater and sewage flow in the same pipe). The combined flow weaves its way through the sewers and into our treatment plant, in this case our Southerly plant in Cuyahoga Heights.

Again, you never know what our crews will find in the sewers.

VIDEO: And you thought you'd never be interested in how a pump station works.

For most people, wastewater treatment just happens. It's not something many think about.

One thing we've enjoyed on our social media channels is the ability to bring the real-world work behind cleaning dirty water right in front of people's eyes. Sure, we're biased, but we think it's amazing, and it affects the lives all of us live.

Here's a 45-second example. Wastewater Plant Operator Christen Wood shows us what a lift station is and how it makes our treatment process work at our Southerly plant. It's the first in a new series we're launching called "Quick Clips."