I wouldn’t advertise so explicitly, but if it served its purpose as a deterent, I’m not going to fault the guy for being long winded.
I swung by Mr. Comlpetely’s place this evening ad found that he had linked to an excellent post on the subject of ‘Disaster Guns’ written by the Confederate Yankee.
It’s a good piece. If you had any questions about your next firearms purchase, that would be a good place to start. I am glad to say that I have everything on the list.
Speaking of on the list, over the weekend I went through some of my lists of equipment and then through the equipment itself last night and ended up cleaning a goodly number of my firearms in the process. They didn’t really NEED it, but what is a guy to do when presented with the hardware he is expecting to save his ass? That and I still had most of the cleaning supplies out from the clean up of Saturday’s all-day range expedition.
While I was engrossed in the maintenance checks and cleanings last night I put my mind into the random thinking process about New Orleans. I guess the disaster preparedness bug has got me wishing I had my archives up so that I could link to the first post about guns and ammo supplies.
Mostly because I have promised myself to stand down from speaking of the blame until after everyone is out that town and cleaned up, I instead ventured into what it must be like to stand in downtown New Orleans, more specifically, the smell.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to lay down a good bit of track here, but rest assured, the Anecdotal Express will reach Conclusion Station.
As you all probably know, I work in the trash, recycle, yardwaste, construction debris and land clearing transportation industry. I currently work at what is generally called a transfer station, but the folks within the industry generally call a ‘material recovery facility’.
Basically, everything in the city of Seattle comes into there and companies and people pay to dump their stuff there. Personally, I just do the inbound and outbound weighing of the trucks, but most of my co-workers at this site driver either the loading machinery or the tractors trucks that haul the rail containers to the rail yard where we send down to Oregon and into “The Big Hole in the Ground� there.
When folks scale in, I ask them what they have in their load and then direct them where to dump it while I’m getting their info and scale weight. There are piles for loads ranging from absolute trash to used pallets. The piles are sorted and then loaded into different containers which go to different locations. If we think we can recycle it, even if it mixed in with actual trash, we’ll put it into one of the “sort� piles and grab the good stuff out and push the bad stuff into a pile to be canned for the landfill.
You would not believe the stuff we can recycle.
Material fo the pillars of the proposed Seattle Monorail Project would have come from our concrete piles if the project had not been an absolute debacle. If you live in the northwestern states area, the particle board that went to build your house may have been a pallet or concrete form that we recycled.
But enough about what we do; I should move onto what we don’t do.
We do not let truck driver who just brought in a stinky load or loader driver who just got done with a stinky load into the scale house.
As you can imagine, with all that rotting trash lying around, the aroma where I work is pretty rude. We also have a decent number of rats in residence (which my company won’t let me shoot when it gets slow at night, not even with a pellet rifle).
But we also have some especially ripe loads come in pretty regularly. One customer, a fish packer, throws away nothing but spoiled fish. If one of the fishing boats comes in and part or all of their load has gone bad for whatever reason, they throw it into a large truck box (8ft x 8ft x 20ft) along with the rest of their daily operational trash and we take it in.
Rotting fish: Bad, but not the worst.
We have another customer who does nothing but shell crab. Actually, I guess that they are the ones who kill the crab so that they can rip its legs off and sell them. These guys have a large box also, not quite as large as the fish packer’s box, but close. So imagine that, approximately fifteen cubic yards of spoiled and sunbaked crab guts.
Crab guts: Really bad, but not the worst.
The worst load I have had come in was when our local ship drydocking/repair company got the order to repaint the hulls of all the ships of the local cruise ship company. Five boats, each of them hundreds of feet long a piece, hulls covered in those itty-bitty barnacles, each of them needing to be scraped off so that the boat could be repainted. We took 3-40 cubic yard boxes to the shipyard for them to be filled with the scraped off paint and the barnacles. And they filled each of the boxes up twice.
Now, to say that these loads stunk was an understatement of infinite proportions.
I noticed something truly wretched in the air a full minute before the truck even pulled into the scale yard, it was that bad. It was so bad that the first driver noticed the smell on the way to pick up the first box and turned around, refusing to go near it. We found a braver soul who took one of the newly refurbished trucks and had himself sealed inside the cab with duct tape and made me call ahead to have someone waiting near the box to set the cable hook that pulls the box onto the truck.
He brought it in and dumped it using the in-cab controls, not leaving the cab until he got out to hose the box out with our magic chemical based odor killer and lots and lots of water.
We actually got calls from people in their cars complaining of the smell and also from the Seattle Police asking us to wait to haul the next box until they could escort us to and from. They deemed the smell enough of a distraction that they wanted to clear the roads or make people stop and pull over before our truck passed them.
Even with just hauling three boxes that day and his only contact with those boxes being the washing out process, the driver stunk so bad that no one would go near him at the end of the day. The facility stunk so horribly that for two days, private haulers would roll in and then turn around to wait another day before emptying their trucks.
And despite what you might think, it wasn’t a ‘fish’ or even a ‘sea creature’ smell. It was like week old sweat mixed with burning flesh and rancid feces all mixed together with a touch of overheated brake pads to top it off.
With the sewers backing up, the leakage of gasoline and other petroleum based fluids, the fires and the dead in that town, that is what I imagine New Orleans smells like right now.
May whatever deity you worship help the men and women currently trying to evacuate the last of the residents out and get law and order restored in New Orleans.
It is currently Monday morning and there is still no word from my corporate bosses as to whether or not I’ll be allowed to go there to help in any way I can. More phone calls, left messages and emails are in my future today.