Potpourri

harmless and you couldn’t smell the ammonia right away, once I saw it (and smelled it), I knew that choices had to be immediately made.

Encounters With Chemicals

Sometimes when you see a large billowing fog bank rolling in, it could be one of the largest gaseous anhydrous ammonia leaks in the state of Florida. I’ve witnessed one and it remains number one in my top ten list of coolest things I’ve ever seen, with number two being a lightning bolt without a cloud in the sky disrupting a family reunion out in the woods about 40 miles south of Opp, a city in Alabama.

The ammonia leak happened one night at work. Even though it initially looked

Everyone needed to get upwind of the leak, but two guys were near the loading dock; one guy was loading fertilizer and driving a payloader at the warehouse and the other guy was down by the train tracks unloading molten sulfur. Neither of them could hear me, and they were too far away for me to get to each one.

Thank goodness no one was hurt. Just saying, though—sometimes things look harmless, but they just might not be!

I started working at a chemical plant when I was still a teenager, young and dumber than the average person. After almost nine years, I had seen many fatal and even more nonfatal accidents, and was involved in dozens of close calls of my own. My father and grandpa really couldn’t believe that I made it out of there alive. When I suggested to them that I was probably immortal, my pop was quick to say it was more likely I was confusing the term immortal with immoral!

There was a gas leak at this plant from some 4- to 100-ton ammonia tanks that were popping off because an operator had forgotten to stop the transfer from the pipeline from Tampa.

I was reprimanded for the first time, along with another employee, because we went up on top of the tanks once he’d got the transfer stopped, and we closed the manual valves below the pressure relief valves on the tanks—with no safety equipment. There was only one self-contained breathing apparatus available at that part of the plant, and it was up inside the diammonium phosphate building, which the foreman used to escort five other employees down the stairs and outside.

Again, everyone was okay, but the chickens at the farm down the road didn’t fare so well. The farm later sued the plant for the dead chickens—plus the eggs that didn't exist yet!

Safe Work Practices Start With Training

I’m sure you’re wondering by now why I’m babbling on about something that has nothing to do with the wastewater or water utilities industry. So, here it is: After a massive second layoff at the chemical plant where I worked, it led to me to start a career as a wastewater operator.

It was funny (to me at least, and with some irony) that I’d barely had two years on the job when an article in a 1987 issue of what was then the Journal Water Pollution Control Federation (WPCF) and now known as the magazine of the Water Environment Federation pointed out that the wastewater industry has retained its number one status as the most dangerous career field based on the results from the 1986 annual WPCF safety survey.

What had I gotten myself into?

Course Work

I thought I should learn some more about safety. I had already taken the California State University (CSU) correspondence course, but was allowed to sign up for the FWPCOA C wastewater residency course, which was 158 hours, three hours a night, three nights a week. A lot of the material was out of the CSU

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