As of August 1st, it'll be two years since I left that hole in the desert behind. Distance has not made the memory fonder. Working there was positively surreal.
I have worked for technically worse companies in the past- Werner Enterprises springs immediately to mind, a company that I saw actively put people's lives in danger and occasionally get them killed. While I have a lot I could say about the likes of Werner, what I can at least give them some minimal credit for is that they actually achieved tasks, albeit in perverted, unsafe, and negligent fashion.
The dump? Not so much. It was as though somebody set out to create the perfect amalgam, a combination of all the behaviors and shortcomings mocked in both government and private enterprises. It was the most fucked-up, shit-tastic place I ever worked. The entire environment was so comically incompetent and actively militant against even the most basic accomplishment. I kid you not- simply pumping a septic tank bogged down because the Operations Director, who had been deliberately removed from directing the other two major projects going on at the time, assumed direct control. Among other things, he rented too small a pump for the operation, then had a little hissy on the radio about how a bigger pump would've been more expensive.
As for why the Operations Director wasn't directing operations at that point, well, that's the subject of a future update.
Now, I would like to make the following things clear:
I won't be sharing confidential info in all this. Everything I'll be talking about is essentially public record. As such, there'll be omissions at certain parts of the story either because it's covered by the blanket NDA I signed or because it was covered in a private meeting.
Secondly, not everything was bad about the place and not everyone was a clusterfucked clown show. The environmental safety record at the site was largely exemplary due to the fantastic attention of the environmental department, well-crewed and managed by two brilliant folks who I'd work for, with, or over on any day of the week. It was a pleasure sharing the field with that crew. There were plenty of other upstanding individuals, often doing the best they could to just get along and fight the good fight in the face of cronyism, nepotism, political sewage, and in one case that I'm fairly sure of, out and out fucking graft.
That's why the place sticks in my head so much- it really was the best and the worst. I met people I still keep touch with to this day, and others who I'm quite happy to see. Nowadays when I see them and they haven't left already I ask when they're giving notice.
To give you an idea of what the place is about, it's a RCRA/Mixed waste processing and disposal facility. The mixed waste here refers to waste that has both radioactive and hazardous wastes in the stream, which means that the hazardous elements will have to be neutralized or diluted to a safe standard.
In thirteen years of operation, the facility has turned a profit precisely once- the year they won a lawsuit against a company trying to buy them out. The lawsuit went down because it turned out that the owner of the plant was actually also a minority owner of the company trying to buy them. How this works out to be lawsuit material I do not know, but billionaires play by different rules.
As the plant did not operate with a real imperative to make money for over a decade, it settled into a complacency that made it ill-equipped to handle actual, well, work. Promotions were given to people who had no functional experience in managing crews or actually accomplishing anything. I know that's a time-honored American practice and I've seen it plenty of other places, but this facility exceeded even the typical dysfunctional management culture, one that was utterly paralyzed in the face of concepts like 'planning', 'preparation', 'training', and other mystical arcana as employed by the functionally competent and non-vegetative.
When I started there, the disposal of radioactive material had not yet commenced as both licenses were still outstanding. So 'regular' wastes could be treated and disposed of (PCB-contaminated materials, acids, asbestos, etc.) while rad waste was processed and packaged, either to be shipped back offsite, or kept onsite for eventual disposal when the proper licensing came through and the landfills for said waste was constructed.
Actual processing of waste was primarily handled by two different crews, who worked at adjoining buildings whose names gave the names for the crews. For regular hazardous waste, it was the Stabilization (Stab) building and hence the Stab crew, and Mixed Waste Treatment Facility (Technically the MWTF crew, but because the building was originally the Permacon, the crew was the 'Permatards' and only management called it the MWTF.)
Me, I started out on Permacon with no feckin' clue what the hell that even meant. The HR director at the time was so oblivious as to the work actually being done in the Permacon that he told me that I'd move drums around and maybe drive a forklift.
Heh heh heh. Kinda true.
So, now for the project that would in so many ways encapsulate the experience of the dump: the TC Project.
Wikipedia says this about a Ton Container:
Oh yes, yes they have indeed. My first week at the plant, I rode in with my shiny new carpool and we passed by a flatbed carrying a load of TCs. At the time, I had no idea how a bit over a year later my life would essentially revolve around the stupid things.A ton container is a steel, cylindrical barrel equivalent in length and diameter to two stacked 55-gallon drums. A ton container weighs approximately 1,600 pounds and measures nearly seven feet in length.[1]
The United States Army has used ton containers to store and ship bulk chemicals, including chemical agent, since the 1930s.
So the Army does indeed use them for the storage of chemical agents. CS and CN, Lewisite, and other agents. I don't know if they use 'em for VX and so on, supposedly nothing we ever handled was used for nerve gas. Supposedly, because as often as everybody involved in the project lied to us, I wouldn't trust 'em about sunrises and the law of gravity without verification.
The US government signed a treaty for the disposal of its chemical agents, so the Army got about the process by shipping TCs by the bucketload to Pine Bluff in Arkansas, where they would neutralize the contents of each TC with a process that's actually pretty cool. They hooked up an electromagnet to heat the interior to some cool-ass over-thousand-degree Fahrenheit temperature, thus breaking the agents down into their constituent and allegedly nonharmful parts.
From there, our task was supposed to be simple- use an automated plasma torch cutting system and an automated conveyor. Chop 'em in half, load 'em up, ship 'em to the smelter.
Where does all this excess process come in, you ask? Well, the containers were made in the thirties, yes, and therefore the interiors are relic steel. For those who don't know, relic steel is steel that hasn't been contaminated by the products of above-ground nuclear detonations. This is extremely useful for the creation of very sensitive measuring environments, such as body count testing chambers and the like. The testing facility we used in Carlsbad made the walls of its testing room out of metal salvaged from steel shutters buried in Dresden, for example.
Now, so far as the crew and apparently management had been informed by both the prime contractor (we were subcontract) and the Army, the contents of the TCs were totally inert and harmless. So... why would the work have to be conducted as a hazmat facility? Our management was so oblivious to things that I wouldn't be surprised that they never even stopped to ask themselves the question. Rather, they saw a decent-paying long term project that looked simple, with Uncle Sam footing the bill for any necessary equipment needed for processing. At this point the crew had been told it was a two-man job on the ops side- one man to run the equipment and a forklift operator to snatch away the cut pieces.
That ended when one of the guys slotted for the job went out to look at the newly arrived TCs. He was walking around the truck when he noticed something pooled in the lip around the bevels of the TCs...
(That part looks somewhat like this, only ours had all the paint cooked off.)
"By golly!" he said "That looks like mercury!"
To be continued...