I THOUGHT I WAS AN ENGINEER

 

1970’s

 

 

The 3500 cfm blower rattled away as the smoke bomb released its load into the sewer. What in the world was I doing here? Up close and personal examination of sanitary sewers had never been on my agenda. I recalled my junior year in high school and the PSAT – Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. Those of us that wanted to take it had done so in the spring. Three grueling days of tests, all day every day until your brain wanted to explode. We never saw the scores at the time, but they were forwarded to universities all over the country. In May of that year I started receiving individually typed letters of invitation to engineering schools. I found out much later I had achieved a perfect score in the math portion of the test.

 

I selected the University of Missouri, never took the SAT or any kind of entrance exam, and after five years graduated as a full-fledged civil engineer. Before I even graduated, I was enrolled in Graduate School, Environmental Engineering. I did not realize that in the civil engineering world of 1971, I would be type cast as a Sanitary Engineer, doomed to work endlessly on water and wastewater systems. So now, for seven and one-half years, I became vastly experienced in this rather simple field. I hated it.

 

To finish this beginning, I will just tell you that the EPA – Environmental Protection Agency – had decided it needed to have extraneous water removed from all the municipal wastewater collection and treatment systems it was having built and rebuilt.   There were no design standards for this, no regulatory standards, it was an untrammeled field. In Region VII, the EPA office in Kansas City picked a premier consulting firm with a reputation for doing stellar work and über bona fides to perform the pilot work in Infiltration/Inflow Analysis, or Sewer System Evaluation Survey as it was later called. That firm was my firm. The premier engineer to grub around in the sanitary systems was…me.   This was to be my fate.

 

I conducted 10 studies for my firm over several years. Being the first in, I pioneered measurement techniques and examination techniques.   After the first few studies, I wrote the section in the EPA guidelines dealing with pressure smoke testing, although I never got a single credit for it. Not that I wanted the credit. The basic problem was how to find where surface water entered a system. This caused the most problems with overloaded pipes and drowned treatment plants. During the first study ever done, I realized several things. Spot measurement of wastewater flow did not locate the problems; neither did televising the interior of the pipes. I decided that pumping smoke into the sewers under slight pressure was the thing to do.

 

I approached Wald Fireworks under the Broadway Bridge in Kansas City for a smoke bomb with some duration that was not toxic, non-staining, and odor free – my very words.   Such a smoke bomb did not exist.   The pretty colored bombs used by the military not only had an enduring stink, but were toxic to boot. But, there was a market, and in a few months Wald came up with an appropriate smoke bomb, and I came up with a method for introducing the smoke under pressure into the systems. It was spectacularly successful.

 

So, I have a lot of tales about this aspect of my career, some of which are at least amusing, if not exactly rewarding from an engineering viewpoint.

 

 

Warrensburg, Missouri.

 

It took several months to examine a city the size of Warrensburg. When we started the smoke testing program, we put out as much notification as possible, because the bombs, you see, put out as much smoke as a large house fire, and it was likely to erupt anywhere, frequently in houses.   We equipped ourselves with a police radio and notified the fire department as each test started so that they would not be put out rushing to a non-existent fires. Of course, the residents seldom got the word, and were unduly upset when the neighborhood started burning down around them and no one showed up.

 

We were testing in the old town area one day next to the railroad tracks where there were a number of bars located in turn-of-the-century buildings. The sewers were pretty porous in this area, so we pumped in a lot of smoke. The test was rolling along, and my crew had scattered in all directions to note smoking gutters and drains and holes in the ground, when a bar just up the street suddenly erupted drunken patrons along with a tremendous gush of smoke. The last man out had his pants around his knees and toilet paper streaming out behind. We discretely shut down the blower and stood behind our truck. No point in having drunken patrons chased out of their bar chasing us down, particularly the man who was sitting on the toilet when smoke burst out through the floor around his feet.

 

In another part of town, a new multi-story building for the university was under construction. It had the plumbing in, but of course no water traps were filled. We were pumping smoke in a sewer about a block away, when the building suddenly appeared to burst into flames at multiple locations. Did I mention spectacular? Construction workers came boiling out like wasps from a kicked nest; at first thinking a giant mysterious conflagration was taking place. I sent Kenny, my smallish longhaired assistant over to explain, more as a joke than out of necessity. In moments, Kenny came running down the street hair flying pursued by hardhatted workers, clearly in danger of his life. I had to intervene, using my authority as an engineer to cow the workers.   Eventually, I convinced them it was really pretty funny. They had gotten a completely excusable break and got to scare a longhair to death.

 

It was also in Warrensburg where I did a middle of the night flow measurement at several key locations.   This was before I had automatic measuring devices, and I was forced to climb into manholes between two and five a.m., measuring depth of infiltration water in the pipes. I was in the very last manhole at about 5:30 a.m., which happened to be in someone’s backyard. I took my measurement and climbed wearily out, only to look straight into the business end of a rifle being held by a nervous youth. It took some fast talk to avoid getting shot in the head as some sort of weird pervert that climbed into the toilets from the sewer pipes.   I had to convince him to let me call the police on my radio while he covered me with the gun.

 

One last incident about Warrensburg involved some super red dye I placed in a creek to look for subsurface inflow into a major sewer that ran under it in several places. I had a bunch of these red dye cones that could easily turn a large lake red. I didn’t find any leaks, but I did find the creek ran through a pasture containing dairy cows that drank water from the creek. I don’t believe the dye hurt the cows, but it did turn all their milk pink for a day. That made quite a story, with a lot of professors from the local university trying to explain what must have happened, but not getting even close to the answer. Perhaps it was aliens. I never owned up to being the alien, but what the heck, I didn’t know there were dairy cows. So, if you ever read the story about the famous pink milk emitting from the cows in Warrensburg and wondered, now you know. I am sure the statute of limitations has run out by now.

 

 

Lee’s Summit, Missouri

 

 

Liberty, Missouri

 

Liberty is also a college town, home to William Jewell College, formerly summer training camp for the Kansas City Chiefs football team. One hot summer day we were running a smoke test on the campus near the football field. It was close to the end of the day, and 80 or so football players had retired to the locker room under the stands for showers and debriefing. As luck would have it, we pumped smoke directly into the shower room, and out came naked football players by the dozen. They ran onto the track to the delight of the news media, particularly the female news media. We were set up at the west end of the football field and quickly decided to quietly retreat. That one also made a lot of news, but the office and the City thought we should maintain a low profile. Wouldn’t want to run off the Chiefs. Unfortunately, we apparently did as they moved their training camp to Minnesota not long after that. There are probably some good photos of that smoke test still floating around newsrooms in KC.

 

Once we opened a manhole in a very old part of town, only to find an aluminum ladder in it. We removed the ladder, somewhat pitted from exposure to acidic gas, when a strange little old man came trotting up angrily ordering us to put it back. We tossed the ladder in the truck, declining to put it back, and asked the strange little man why he wanted it there anyway. He sputtered something incoherent about looking up the pipes, but then, perhaps realizing he appeared slightly insane, wandered away. I am sure we looked insane to bystanders, but at least we were getting paid for it. I kept that ladder and still have it.   It is, in fact, residing behind the door to my study where I sit typing this. I can’t bring myself to throw away a perfectly good ladder, especially one obtained for free from a sewer. It’s a memento.

 

In the same general neighborhood, we opened a really deep manhole to find most of a Volkswagen in it.   Parts really, and no engine. We had to call the City maintenance on that one to clear it out. The bug could clearly be causing some backups in the pipes, and besides, we needed to inspect those pipes. It made quite a pile on the street, and created a bit of news. Other manholes in the area were stuffed with brush and grass clippings. It was quite an interesting neighborhood. At least we didn’t come across any bodies.

 

Liberty, in the days of sailing ships, had a rope walk industry making huge hawsers used for anchor cables. These hawsers were as much as 15 inches in diameter and 300 feet long, and were made from hemp fiber.   The farms around Liberty grew a lot of hemp for the rope walks. Hemp, in today’s parlance, is Marijuana, and it is a very prolific weed. So it grows wild all around Liberty. We got very familiar with it. Kenny, being a longhair, tried smoking it once and pronounced it to be ‘ditch weed’, or non-narcotic. That didn’t stop the local and non-local hippie population from harvesting the stuff in late summer, which, of course, required a response from the local police. I discovered that the male Marijuana plants produced enormous amounts of yellow pollen, which I was allergic to. It was also practically impossible to cut the plants out of the way with our machetes, which is why it makes such good rope I guess.

 

We were doing down-manhole pipe examinations along the Fishing River interceptor sewer running through the fields south of town one day. This task was made even more obnoxious by having to cut through thick stands of ditch weed, scattering clouds of pollen while the stalks wrapped around the machete blades. Being really unpleasant work, I assigned myself to drive the truck following the boys into the middle of a field. We located the manhole and the boys industriously cleared the weed from around it while I sat on the tailgate. Suddenly, a movement caught my eye off in the weeds. A man slowly stood up about 100 feet away and stared at us. While he was staring, a police car came into sight creeping up the trail I had made with the truck. I quickly got on my police radio and called dispatch, telling the girl where we were and what was happening. In a moment, the man standing in the field watching us put a radio to his ear, then slowly sank down out of sight again. The police car started up and slowly backed away. Of course, we had inadvertently chopped our way right into the middle of a police stakeout intended to catch those evil ditch weed harvesters.

 

Once we noticed a patch of Marijuana right along I-35. This patch appeared domestic, and just because we could and had grown to hate the stuff; we stopped, turned on our rotating lights, walked over and cut it all down. We then loaded it into the truck and took it away for dumping elsewhere. There was a well-worn path coming from the woods to the patch.   Endlessly inspecting sewers had not made us happy or forgiving people.

 

Perhaps this next incident was payback for cutting down someone’s Marijuana patch. We pumped smoke laden air into the sewers with the afore mentioned blower via an 8 inch diameter yellow slinky hose. The hose was fed into a manhole through our own custom cast iron manhole cover. I had obtained the cover and cut an 8-inch hole in it with my blowtorch for the slinky. The cover was very heavy and would not lift up under the air pressure induced in the manhole, a problem we had had with our plywood custom cover.   It was a standard 24-inch CI cover and weighed about 50 pounds.

 

We had a problem in Liberty. The old town sewer system was very old indeed. The manholes were built from brick. Some of the pipes were actually carved stone with oak strip inverts. They were full of huge roaches as well as miscellaneous objects. The covers and cover ring risers were an odd size. Our custom cover was too small to fit on the old ring risers, but, if one was careful, it could be wedged in the ring about halfway down, as the rings were slightly funnel shaped, but the rings had to be rusty to hold it in place.

 

We were about done with Liberty testing. Our last test was in old town, and our cover was wedged in the riser of the manhole.   We finished the test and were sitting around congratulating ourselves. Kenny perched on the edge of the manhole after pulling out the slinky.   He casually reached in and grasped the custom cover by the edge of the 8-inch hole while chatting. Suddenly, and without any warning, the cover slipped through the ring and plunged into the manhole. Not a problem, except Kenny held onto it with his left hand. Just as suddenly, Kenny plunged into to the manhole following the cover. It was like a magic trick. Now you see him. Now you don’t. We jumped over to the manhole, which fortunately wasn’t deep. There was Kenny, upside down on the bottom, basically unhurt, shocked, and really, really unhappy. We collapsed laughing. Kenny had to find his own way out. He refused to hand up the cover.

 

 

North Kansas City

 

North Kansas City was the last sewer system study I did for the company. In fact, it was the last project I did for the company period.   Way back in college, I had sworn to myself I would be independent by the age of 30. I had passed 30 while working in Lee’s Summit. My first child, Aaron, had come. I was breaking my word to myself. The endless study of sewer systems was a good way to convince me to leave, but of course it wasn’t giving me much useful experience. The North Kansas City study helped me out the door.

 

I spent several months doing the usual climbing in and out of manholes, looking up pipes, pumping in smoke. But I was thinking all the time about starting my own company. I ordered a cheap drafting table from Sears in the ritzy Metcalf South Mall. When it came time to pick it up, it was winter. I went in to get it wearing the ratty old coat held together with duct tape I wore when we were climbing in the manholes. Dirty blue jeans. Beat up construction boots. As I stood in line with numerous women waiting to pick up their Christmas lay-a-way items, I couldn’t help but notice the sidelong looks I was getting.   The women kept edging away until I stood in my own little clearing. I picked up the disassembled table from the clerk who gave me a look of complete distaste.   As I walked out into the cold December air, it hit me. I not only looked like a bum, I smelled like I lived in a dumpster – or perhaps a manhole.   So here was the star engineer, math wizard, who graduated with honors from a major university, almost 31 years old, and a professional sewer rat.

 

My planning to quit went into high gear. I would either go into partnership with Clem Egger in Paola, or start my own company, but I would do it. 1979 came, and I continued to work in North Kansas City. There were months to go on this project, and I felt it was the honorable thing to finish it…if I could. As summer arrived, I was measuring flow rates in key pipes running down to the riverside interceptor sewer. I had perfected the in-system measuring techniques over the years and had reduced it to a really accurate science. At key locations, I built weir structures out of plywood in the bottoms of the manholes.   I would make a template of the invert shape and transfer this to my plywood section. The section had a rectangular notch cut in it for the controlled weir, and the weir had a knife edge made of galvanized sheet metal. I measured depth of flow over the weir with either a bubbler and recorder, or a float recorder. The recorders were mounted at the inside top of the manhole, invisible from the surface and protected from theft. Over time, I discovered I needed a small trapdoor at the bottom of the plywood section that could periodically be lifted to let sediment flush out. I attached a light chain to the door so it could be lifted from above the water.

 

So, I had installed a weir in a manhole about a block downstream from the Cook Paint factory.   We sometimes amused ourselves by tossing matches into the manholes below the paint factory creating a minor explosion from the volatile gases. We never entered these manholes without continuously directing air from our blower into them and also wear gas masks. I noticed one day that the weir needed flushing, and grabbing the chain, gave a tug. To my dismay, the chain came up, having been dissolved below the water line. Flushing had to take place, so directing air into the manhole and donning my mask, I climbed in. Now, after 6 or 7 years of close contact with sanitary sewers, it didn’t really bother me sticking my hand into the water. Reaching the bottom, I reached into the water, or shall we say, liquid, and sludge, and opened the door. I held it open while the sewer flushed out, closed the door, and climbed back out.   I had noticed my arm was tingling while it was submerged. When I got out I saw why. From the middle of my left bicep on, the skin was bright pink and I had no hair.   My arm was completely naked. I guess the liquid was acidic.

 

Well. This was really the final straw. The next day I made a final decision. I would go into business on my own, without a partner. I would call my business REO Engineering. I wrote a nice professional announcement for the partners of the firm, and told them that I would be leaving in two weeks. I expressed my appreciation for all the opportunities they had offered me over the years. And I closed the book. It was time, past time, to start on my real career.