BY Rayburn Casey Hall
I knew of one operator that worked in a waste water treatment plant that never got any sludge on him. He would leave work just as clean as he was when he came in. He worked there for 25 years and never got dirty. He was a conscientious worker, but he was also conscientious about being clean also. He operated in the plant during the hardest time to stay clean, which was during three years of construction. He worked second shift and I followed him on the third. After a rain he would leave looking like I did coming in to work. When I left the next morning, I looked like I had laid down in the mud and wallowed in it.
The majority of people that work in a waste water treatment plant are going to get some sludge or scum on them sooner or later. Mine was sooner. I got activated sludge on me the first day I went to work at the plant. No big story. I grabbed a hold of a plant water screen and it was covered with sludge.
The first thing a waste water plant operator is told, and if he don’t listen, he learns the hard way, don’t start a positive displacement pump while the discharge valve is in the closed position. If you push the start button on a Marlowe belt driven piston pump with the valve closed, you will hear the belts start squealing in seconds, and before you can get the stop button pushed and the shear pens break, you will be showered with sludge. And it ain’t no warm fuzzy feeling either. Your uniform will be covered; your shoes full, your hair soaked with it, you will be trying to get it out of your eyes, and all this time you are trying to spit the salty used food out of your mouth.
Someone falling into a settling basin, or a wet well, or a sludge trough, can be funny to everybody else, embarrassing to the person that fell in, but all employees in a waste water plant recognizes the danger to anyone that falls in and that everyone should take precautions and avoid. But it is going to happen to a few people, but luckily it rarely happens. Well at least I think it rarely happens. There was a case where evidence showed an employee fell in, but he managed to get cleaned up before anybody seen him.
I was standing in the control room one day looking out the window and I seen a man coming up the road and he looked like Frankenstein. He was walking stiff legged and with his legs spread apart, he was holding his arms straight out from his side. As he got closer, I could tell he was covered in some brown greasy looking material from head to toe. The closer he got to the control room building, the bigger the crowd grew around him. I went outside myself to see what kind of monster had gotten into the plant. When I got close to him, but at a safe distance, I could see it was one of our plant operators. He was covered with scum from head to toe.
We got him cleaned up and took him to the emergency room to get him checked out for any injures and the Doctors gave him hepatitis and tetanus shots. He was Ok except for being embarrassed, which got worse later. He was working at the scum end of the primary clarifier and breaking up thick scum before it got to the rakes. He was standing on top of an eight inch thick wall (not supposed to do that) and stepped off of it backward.
Faith wasn’t as kind to the next diver. The first one that fell in was working the day shift on a warm summer day. The next guy picked the midnight shift to fall in, in the winter, and the temperature was 10 degrees Fahrenheit. He was priming a secondary clarifier claravac and tripped and fell and ended up on his back in the bottom of a trough submerged in activated sludge. Luckily he had a co-worker with him and helped him get up and out of the trough. His co-worker contacted their Chief Operator via radio and reported the accident. He was hauled to the control building on the back of a pickup. He didn’t want to mess up the truck seats. By the time they got him into the building and to the shower, the sludge on him had frozen and breaking up into chunks. He looked like a frozen ice cream fudgesicle or brown cow. Again luck was on his side and the city’s, he received no physical injuries but a big wounded pride.
The next operator that fell in was a professional scuba diver. He was working to break up harden activated sludge on the influent end of a secondary clarifiers. The influent end of the clarifiers has barriers to control short circuiting in the tank. And because the area is static the lighter solids will float to the top and set up and become a hard crust on top of the flow. The operator was breaking up the hardened crust with a water hose while standing on the top surface of the tank. He had cleaned one section of a tank and replaced the grate before starting on another one. When he got the grating off the next one to clean, he stepped on the grating that he had just replaced, and he and the grating went into the clarifier. Luckily the grating was too big to go all the way in and lodged before going to the bottom. The operator was left standing in the clarifier in mixed liquor up to his neck. He couldn’t crawl out of the tank alone without some help. He had pulled his radio out of his pocket and laid it on the side of the clarifier so he wouldn’t accidently drop it in. He managed to get a hold of the radio and called for help. His worst injury was to his ego.
After the first operator fell in the primary, a club was formed called the Clarifier Snorkel Club. From then on each unfortunate operator was issued a certificate with his new nickname on it. Each inductee had to learn and repeat the club’s slogan “Well Shut My Mouth”. This all took place at the Annual Christmas dinner party.
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