If you’re in this field for any length of time, you’re going to have your share of horror stories to tell. It’s the same in any field, but when you mix that common “you can’t win ‘em all” reality with the nature of the materials pumpers handle on a daily basis … well, sometimes it just ain’t pretty.
This month, we talk with a few operators about that one job they just can’t forget, but would probably like to. We offer these stories as a reminder that you’re not alone out there, as a bit of comic relief, or maybe just so you can say, “Hey, better you than me!”
Rollie Unruh’s nightmare job is the recurring kind, because it’s not just in the past, but one he continues to struggle with. “We service a provincial park that has seven outhouses. They’re deep, and you can’t back up to them because they’re in the trees. So you have to string out your hose (for quite a distance). But it’s just solid paper, because we only get called to pump it maybe once or twice a year. It just gets so solid and backed up.”
On one visit, he decided to try backflushing to break up the solid layer that had formed over the top of one of the park’s tanks. The park’s manager happened to be there, and Unruh asked her to help in monitoring the level, since he was alone on the job. “I asked her to tell me when it was two feet from the top, so I could shut off my valve,” he recalls. “Well, she didn’t realize it doesn’t stop flowing the second you shut it off, so she waited. Of course, it overflowed and came out all over the ground. What a mess!” He had to clean it up and realized that backflushing wouldn’t work for this situation.
Unruh often has to stop and clear his hoses because of the inappropriate items he ends up sucking into the flow. “Disposable diapers are the worst,” he says, “because they don’t fit through 3-inch pipes.”
“It’s really a two-man job, and we still do it,” he says. “It’s the most brutal one we do.” He’s quiet a moment, thinking about how the once-a-year pump-out just isn’t enough for the way the park restrooms are used.
He says the charge for the job reflects its distasteful nature. But still, he thinks about letting it go. “It’s no flat-rate job. We charge by the hour, so we get paid for all the extra work it takes. We show no mercy on that, because my competition wouldn’t do that job. I think if we quit, they’d be up the creek. I know not many people would do it. It’s just too rank.”
A McDonald’s grease trap on Cape Cod is the stuff that Shawn McElroy’s bad dreams are made of. In the busy, tourist-loaded area, “It hadn’t been cleaned in about five to seven years,” he recalls. “And the crust was about six feet thick.”
He alternated backflushing with probing and physical agitation with a long-handled shovel for three days before he was able to fully pump out the trap. “Plain hard work” is how he describes it. But was it worth the effort?
“Oh, yeah,” he says, grinning. “They originally called on a backup, and were more than happy to write that check when we were done.”
The bad dream had a happy long-term ending, too. McElroy was able to put the restaurant on a regular, quarterly pumping schedule. The restaurant became a solid customer for five years before it was sold.
Not just a distasteful or brutal job, Kelly Murphy’s wish-I-could-forget-it situation was truly horrifying.
“I was at the shop one day, cleaning by myself. I moved the barrel of blue tank chemicals. It fell over, and the top popped out of it,” he remembers. The blue concentrate hit the cement floor and splashed into his face. It got in his eyes, up his nose, and burned his hair away. “It put me down,” he recalls. “I thought I was gone that day.”
He couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t see. He crawled around on the floor in the growing puddle of chemicals, groping for the garden hose, which he finally found. “I started rinsing all over me, getting it out of my mouth and my eyes. I just kept rinsing, over and over. I couldn’t see for a long time.”
A friend just outside the garage heard him gagging and came to his rescue. He was taken to the hospital, where poison control measures were taken. He went to the opthamologist the next day to make sure he hadn’t done any permanent damage to his eyes. He hadn’t.
“I was lucky,” he says. “I just never had the proper respect for that stuff. I do now.” He believes everyone in the pumping industry — from the bosses on down — could benefit from a refresher safety course on how to handle chemical products.
Such a situation happens quickly, and could affect any pumper. Murphy laughs about it now with some measure of embarrassment. But mostly, it’s with relief, because he knows it could have turned out much worse than it actually did.
