Working with waste, working conditions can be unpleasant. But when you’re faced with a tough technical challenge on top of that, the situation can turn downright ugly. Stubborn waste material, inadequate room to work, lacking the right tools for the job and dealing with touchy customers can make a situation go from bad to worse. Yet, pumpers who enjoy a challenge find these scenarios the most interesting, if not enjoyable.
The truly tough jobs are the ones pumpers turn into learning, growing experiences through their perseverance and creativity. These are the situations that prove the adage, “Kites rise against the wind.”
Learn here about some of the more gnarly experiences your colleagues have encountered, and how they rose above the challenges.
“I had just finished a grease trap pumping job and was ready to do another one,” recalls Jerry Distel of a certain pump run during a northwest Ohio winter. He smiles sheepishly as he continues his story. “For some reason, when I got out of the truck, I put the pump on the pressure setting instead of vacuum. So when I opened the valve, the hose jumped up out of the trap.
“It sprayed the customer’s building and got grease all over the place. Plus me, I was a mess. It was about 10 degrees. I had a very bad mess on my hands.” A pumper’s understatement. What did he do to clean up the coagulating mess before it froze solid?
“We had to wash everything down with hot water,” he says. “I scrubbed everything real good. Got everything off the building and the sidewalk, and used the truck to suck up the mess.”
Distel reports that it was a lesson well learned. He now always makes sure the pump control is where it ought to be before he opens the valve.
It was another grease trap, at a golf course restaurant near Thompson’s Station, Tenn., that threw a curve at Buddy Tomlin. A septic and grease trap pumper operating just a stone’s throw south of Nashville, Tomlin was called in to locate and eliminate a line backup.
He knew he was in for some trouble when he learned the trap had never been pumped before — it wasn’t a new restaurant. Upon inspection, Tomlin and his crew discovered a scum layer about 30 inches thick.
“It had just been there so long, and had never had anything done to it at all,” he says. “At least, nobody there had any recall of anything ever being done.” The Williamson County Septic crew wrestled with the stubborn crust for about three hours before finally being able to break it up.
“We used our Crust Buster (Schmitz Bros. LLC, www.crustbusters. com) and it took some time, but we finally got it to go. Then we had to add a lot of hot water to help break it up, and used the Crust Buster to blow it back into the liquid and form a slurry.”
After pumping the resulting slurry, the crew trucked it to a permitted private processing plant where they dispose of all fats, oils and grease.
Steve Lojovich’s nightmare job involves only your run-of-the-mill septage, but the pumping process itself was anything but ordinary. Lojovich’s Advantage Septic & Drain Service has a customer base of about 75 percent residential septic pumping, with the rest being commercial drain cleaning jobs in the small town of Burtrum, not quite halfway to Fargo, N.D., from the Twin Cities.
“I have one customer who put a 500-square-foot addition onto the house,” he explains. “They’d located (an abandoned) septic tank and been careful to stay away from it. Problem is, they ended up building the addition over the top of their active drainfield.”
When Lojovich got the call to pump the system, he couldn’t find the cleanout. Following the basement plumbing, he realized what had happened. “I just looked where that pipe was running and went, ‘Oh, no! How am I going to tell these people what I have to do to get access to their tank?’”
It turns out the homeowners had seen the unidentified lid coming out of the ground and left an opening flush to the floor in the new room. Lojovich carefully cut away a section of carpeting over the spot to access the cleanout and was able to service the tank.
“Fortunately, it wasn’t a tough scum layer where I had to bring in an agitator, which I have to do on most of my other jobs,” Lojovich says.
