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The plant is fukt.
As I came in this morning, I see the other operator doing his morning rounds. Everything looked normal, but there was a pretty funky smell in the air.
I get my lab work finished and in comes the other operator. He tells me the wonderful news.
Friday night, there was a problem with one of the sludge pumps. There are three of them, and two of them are always going - the third is a spare, and we rotate the pumps every month.
Now, what a normal person would do is to (hopefully) turn off one pump and start the sludge wasting on the spare.
Nope.
He shut down the bad pump completely, but didn't transfer over. So for about 36 hours, the sludge was coming from one pump. Not a good thing.
My bugs are dead. Looking in the microscope this morning, I saw that approximately 25% of them are alive - barely.
There is a septic smell through the entire plant. Sludge weights are way down, about 1/5 of what they should be, except for one. That weight is 3 times higher than it should be (i.e., a "normal" sludge weight is about 4-5000 grams. This weight was almost 16,000!
The plant may go into reject; we won't really know until tomorrow at the earliest. And that means about a 15-page report to the DEP (Dept. of Environmental Protection), which will not make the Director happy.
And the best part of all this? I will be the one to take care of most of it this week.
3 guys are leaving Tuesday for training in Gainesville, 2 guys are going on vacation. That leaves one operator (me) and my Director, who hasn't been "hands on" at the plant for a while now.
This is going to be a fun week.
Wish me luck.
As I came in this morning, I see the other operator doing his morning rounds. Everything looked normal, but there was a pretty funky smell in the air.
I get my lab work finished and in comes the other operator. He tells me the wonderful news.
Friday night, there was a problem with one of the sludge pumps. There are three of them, and two of them are always going - the third is a spare, and we rotate the pumps every month.
Now, what a normal person would do is to (hopefully) turn off one pump and start the sludge wasting on the spare.
Nope.
He shut down the bad pump completely, but didn't transfer over. So for about 36 hours, the sludge was coming from one pump. Not a good thing.
My bugs are dead. Looking in the microscope this morning, I saw that approximately 25% of them are alive - barely.
There is a septic smell through the entire plant. Sludge weights are way down, about 1/5 of what they should be, except for one. That weight is 3 times higher than it should be (i.e., a "normal" sludge weight is about 4-5000 grams. This weight was almost 16,000!
The plant may go into reject; we won't really know until tomorrow at the earliest. And that means about a 15-page report to the DEP (Dept. of Environmental Protection), which will not make the Director happy.
And the best part of all this? I will be the one to take care of most of it this week.
3 guys are leaving Tuesday for training in Gainesville, 2 guys are going on vacation. That leaves one operator (me) and my Director, who hasn't been "hands on" at the plant for a while now.
This is going to be a fun week.
Wish me luck.
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