Carlos Barrios was an accountant for over two decades. It was a nice comfortable desk job. And then he quit. Now he dives into the sewers of Mexico City, into “the bowels of one of the most polluted cities on Earth,” amongst “garbage, bacteria, excrement, dead animals—even the occasional murder victim.”
You can watch him at work here, courtesy of National Geographic.
“In the darkness of the sewer,” we read from this years-old Washington Post article, “Barrios could see nothing. He doesn't bother to carry a light, because it would be of no use in the thick waters. He inched forward in his bright red suit, an airtight model that sealed away the disease all around him, feeling his way with his rubber gloves, listening in the darkness. He could hear the powerful, whirring pump that pushed the flow through a six-foot-wide pipe. His mission was to clear away the debris around it so it wouldn't back up into city streets. Thousands of homes have been flooded in the past by dammed-up wastewater.”