Many years ago, I worked as an enviornmental engineer for
the Inmont Corporation, a maker of paints and inks. Now, for some reason, this company decided, contrary to any
current business sense to acquire a company in Idaho that grew and processed
trout – rainbow trout to be specific.
Inmont and its leaders did not have the faintest idea of the ins and
outs of the trout business, but
diversitfication – forming “conglomerates” was in fashion, so perhaps
the CEO wanted to show that he could make a conglomerate as well. Or perhaps he just like the fact that
the Thousand Springs Trout Company was close to Sun Valley, affording him and
other execs the ability to take ski trips and write them off as business
expenses.
At any rate, there we were, paint and ink guys, in the trout
business. And it also happened
that this was about the time that the US Environmental Protection Agency
started issuing wastewater discharge permits, which Thousand Springs duly
received, and was immediately in violation of. So the company turned to its Corporate Engineering
Department to fix the problem, who then turned to me, a young (mid-20’s)
relatively inexperienced engineer, as I was one of only two environmental
engineers on staff, and the other was quite busy on paint and ink problems more
core to the business. So off
I flew to Buhl, Idaho, to install a wastewater treatment plant for the trout
processing plant of the Thousand Springs Trout Company, located at the bottom
of the Snake River canyon.
As background, the processing of trout involved basically 6
steps: rounding up mature trout, ready for “harvesting” from the farm raceways;
funneling these up a conveyor to a machine that killed them by knocking them on
the head with a pneumatic hammer; continuing through the machine to a section
where the bellies were slit open and guts sucked out; washing the now bloody,
gutless fish in clean, ever changing water; then sending them to a line where
workers (invariably women) de-boned the trout; and finally packing the
processed trout to a trout and sending them into a super-cold freezer. From swimming to freezing took perhaps
20 minutes, so the fish were fresh when shipped in refrigerator trucks to
restaurants across America, the primary customer.
The wastewater problem is easily described. All the processing steps except the
freezing were done using copious amounts of water to sweep away the unwanted
by-products – the blood, guts and bones.
And this polluted water was, after only coarse screening of the guts and
bones, sent directly to the Snake River, thereby polluting what was otherwise
quite a clean river. The EPA,
quite justifiably did not like this, and Thousand Springs was under pressure to
clean up the water or face significant penalties.
So I proceeded to design a treatment plant. The solution was actually very
technically challenging, for a number reasons, most importantly a severe lack
of space. The plant was,
after all, in the bottom of a canyon, squeezed between the canyon walls and the
river, with almost all of the flat land taken up by fish raceways (where the
trout are grown.) A second problem
was the sheer quantity of water used – it was free, and more water use meant
cleaner processed fish, so the processing plant was designed to maximize water
use.
My solution was twofold. First, reduce water use in the
plant to the minimum level needed to assure clean fish, thereby reducing the
size of the needed treatment plant – not to mention cost, which the company
cared about more than anything else.
Second, install a then innovative plant using “dissolved air flotation”
(now a pretty common technology) as this technology could reduce pollutants
using far less space than conventional biological treatment schemes.
The first step in the wastewater treatment was to filter out
the solids – basically the guts (as I eliminated flushing of bones to the
sewer, collecting them in garbage cans instead.) The filtration was done using a large belt filter, which
would take out the guts, and carry them up an incline, from which they were
dumped into a large guts holding tank – maybe 6 feet deep and 12 feet
across. Cleverly, the guts would
then be blended with the bones to a specific consistency, ground up, and we
would sell the glop to mink farmers as feed. Complete recycling!
Anyway, the plant was designed and installed, and I spent a
number of weeks in Buhl working on the start-up – adjusting things, getting the
air feed rates and screen settings right, teaching the plant staff to operate
the novel technology, etc.
Start-up of wastewater treatment plants is always complicated and takes
some time.
So there I was, working on the treatment plant one day,
adjusting the guts belt filter by turning the set screws at the top. When I slipped. And fell, full backflop, into the now
full guts tank. Unhurt, I then
proceeded to swim through the fish guts to the edge, climb out, and breath a
sigh of relief. By the way, swimming
through trout guts really is quite like swimming in very muddy water, just
heavier. And you really, really
want to keep your head up.
Out of the guts tank, and run to the nearest shower -
unfortunately maybe 50 yards away, which meant passing a number of plant
workers, to stares, stunned recognition of what I was covered in, and of course
laughter. Rip of my clothes,
shower, shower some more, and put on anything dry and available. Then discard the clothes.
I do not recall exactly what I did next, whether return to
work some more or go directly to the hotel. All I do know is the next day, after the story had spread
through the plant, I was the object of much amusement. Who wouldn’t laugh?
To end the tale, the treatment plant was finally
commissioned a week or so later, and we met our discharge permit limits. I got to go to Los Angeles to present a
paper on the ingenious solutions and novel technology used for the
problem. Within a few months, I
left Inmont for another job, and as of the time I left, the treatment plant was
working well. I have no idea how
if fared over subsequent years, but now know that at some point the entire
process plant and treatment plant was demolished, when Thousand Springs was
bought out by their neighboring trout farm, and production was consolidated
into a single plant.
And as for me, well, the experience of swimming through
trout guts has stuck with me (figuratively – the guts and smell were gone in a
day or so). To this day, I do not
eat trout. Don’t have the guts for
it.
