If you are my friend, you know how terrible the past week has been. I will not glorify that situation here. I have, however, started a separate blog where I can express my feelings on the loss of my friend. It is certainly not easy to discuss feelings without fear of ridicule, but, believe it or not, I am a pretty humble fellow. I call myself "The Great" as a joke. If you truly sat down with me one on one, you would know that. This new blog is meant as trusted space for the people I know and perhaps people looking for comfort in their thoughts and emotions who can relate.
So, this blog will continue to bring about the normalcy of my life, even though it was changed forever.
As such, yesterday I had a 15 hour exhausting day. It consisted of traveling to every office within my company, driving various vehicles over the course of 8 total hours, and 7 hours in the cold rain and snow covered ground. The length of the day and arduous nature of the tasks at hand were a great way to exhaust my mind from the current state of things.
What exactly am I doing? I hope you aren't trying to stay awake, because my work explanations have been pretty boring. I was actually excited when I got home yesterday to tell Kim of the results of our effort. She faked yawned, but when we first met I used to tell her about my day and she would fall asleep. So pop a 5 hour energy as this story will take away three of those.
I do environmental cleanup work, specifically for the soil and groundwater. New Jersey is quite the state to fix up in these terms. I have a Site in northern Jersey that has toluene stuck in the groundwater. It is basically an organic solvent. It can be used to dissolve paint, paint thinners (odd), rubber, sealants and also is part of the construction of polyurethane and TNT (trinitrotoluene). Don't worry, I have very little chances of blowing up.
So my boss has traveled the country looking for innovative technologies. We have these units in the groundwater wells that feed a set of nutrients like fertilizer into the water as air is constantly supplied. I will not share any more specifics so as to keep my company off my back. It started out as an experiment/pilot study and has now been accepted as a remediation treatment for the groundwater (that's cleaning mechanism to you common folk). The pilot study was presented at an international conference last October and more details will be published in a future scientific journal. We had 6 treatment points out of 15 total groundwater access points.
The six original areas are all "hard-wired" - i.e., all tubings are entrenched underground. Yesterday we removed one of the units from its permanent installation and transferred it to one of the other 9 non-treated wells. We brought up a trailer from another office and yesterday I constructed the system into a smaller version to fit into the trailer. With the help of my great coworker Sean we had the thing up and running smoothly in no time.
So how bad is it? Well, the toluene concentrations are in the hundreds of thousands parts per billion (ppb) while the required standard is in double digits. When we had the system first set up, one of the original 6 wells had measurably thick amount of the pure toluene in it. After two weeks, that product was completely gone and not returned since. In fact, that well has gone from a measurable/unsampleable amount of pure toluene to no detectable concentrations. Now, through a biweekly maintenance program combined with our "hot-spot" mobile treatment, this Site could probably be free of the toluene worry in a year.
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