AUBURN – Alan Kolln cleans thousands of sandy, leafy, stinky, they-dropped-what-in-there? storm drains every year.

His old Public Works truck with a massive vacuum pump – the “ca-ca sucka” – broke down this summer. For now, he’s got an orange truck with a dump body and a giant clamshell scoop that dribbles on whoever stands too close. Kolln lamented last week, standing next to a gaping grate on Fairview Avenue, that drains are getting clean, but not squeaky, vacuumed-clean.

The new quarter-million-dollar truck on order is really going to suck.

He can’t wait.

“With the new ca-ca truck we’re getting next year my goal is to do the whole city in one summer,” he said.

Kolln’s had this particular job for three years, long enough for him to claim, with a smile:

“I’m the ca-ca man.”

Auburn has at least 3,000 or 4,000 storm drains, maybe more.

“Every time I go out I find new ones,” said Kolln, from Sumner.

Some basins go down five feet, some as much as 25. Once the grate is muscled off, rotting leaves are usually on top. Fine, fine sand is under that.

He and summer helper Jon Wing will scoop out 600 yards of gunk by October. Wing, a recent Edward Little grad who plans to study law enforcement, says the job isn’t bad. One man controls the scoop’s arm on the side of the truck while the other peers down the hole and hand-signals directions like left, right and time to come up.

“If he’s operating (the clamshell scoop), I get pretty dirty. If I’m operating, nobody gets dirty,” Wing said, wryly.

That’s storm drain smack talk.

Kolln laughed. He sort of pranked Wing at the start of the season by not warning him to get out of the way when he opened the back door of the old ca-ca sucka.

“When I did, all that water come out and splattered him,” Kolln said. “When we got back to this, he tried to pay me back, which he did already. So we’re all set now.”

Kolln has only run into two drains in his travels that were exceptionally vile.

One, on French’s Lane, was loaded with a year’s worth of dog doo.

“That was so bad. You had to like take a breath and then go back, come back in, take another breath,” Kolln said.

He’d like to remind dog owners, it’s a storm drain system, not a sewer. Please, don’t doo it.

The other drain was on Pride Road; it gave off a mysteriously awful smell.

Drains that smell whiffy for reasons like the water being low and sewer odor wafting up get a dangling bundle of urinal cake-like deodorizers. Problem, hopefully, solved.

Like collecting change between the cushions…

Kolln says they run into treasures down there using the vacuum system. The old vacuum would suck down just enough water and mess to make something visible while it was still in the basin. They’d go after the thing with a long, hand-like grabber.

“Last two summers, I think we’ve found maybe close to 10-15 cell phones,” he said.

Tools. Wallets. Money.

“It’s like ‘Oh, wow! There’s a quarter.’ So we get in there and get the quarter out,” Kolln said.

Change is tricky, being so flat, but doable.

There are no treasures to be found using the clamshell scoop. The guys would have to dig through the mess in the back of the truck.

Kolln said he pulled up to a drain in the area of Madison and Jefferson streets last summer, ready to clean it, when a homeowner came running at them, frantic.

“Her and her husband got in a fight and she threw her wedding ring down the basin,” Kolln said.

He gave her two options: He could dump the entire contents of the storm basin on her lawn so she could sift for it, or he’d dump the load in a special section of the Public Works pit and she could sift there. She didn’t pick, so he hasn’t cleaned it. Yet.