Workers at a temporary headworks at the Roger Road Wastewater Treatment Facility found a fetus, Monday morning, as they were cleaning a filter.
Wastewater from all over the region south of the Rillito River, comes through the headworks. Determining where the fetus came from, remains a difficult question.
Pima County Wastewater Management department is refurbishing the headworks where sewage enters the Roger Road treatment plant. For now, workers are cleaning large debris from the filter manually.
Normally the large debris is automatically cleared from the filter and trucks carry the debris to the landfill. The headworks have been under construction for three weeks to a month and the fetus might not have been discovered were the normal, automatic system working.
"You know we really have no way of knowing if this is, if this has happened before and we haven't caught it," says Laura Fairbanks of Pima County Wastewater Management. "It's hard to say. About six years ago, a fetus came into the plant and it was spotted on the refuse truck. The same thing happened at that point."
What is happening at this point is the police have the fetus, and an autopsy will determine its age and sex. The mother might have been early in her second trimester.
Counseling is available for the workers who found the fetus, should they decide they need it.
