HOW THEY LEFT US KNOW

We had only been aware for 2 months of Mom’s breast cancer, which had metastasized throughout her body by the time she let on that she thought she had a problem.  On the weekend when she left us, she had asked Dad to call the ambulance, as she couldn’t’ get out of bed to get to the bathroom. 

By Monday she was fading fast.  I had decided to go to work, reasoning I can wait for a phone call anywhere.  My wife called early in the afternoon and told me Dad had called and told us that Mom had died.  I called him from work, and he told me he had been to the hospital just before noon and found her disconnected from much of the equipment.  The staff told him nothing, having been told be their doctor that he was a heart patient and to tell him nothing. 

He went back home and was sitting in his recliner, not really thinking of anything in particular, and he heard her voice call his name.  Five minutes later the hospital called to tell him she was gone.  I told him that when she was passing through the doorway that separates this world from the next she turned around to say goodbye to him.

I didn’t know, but 2 years later when Dad died he would let me know that he made it to the other side as well.  Dad had been going downhill from congestive heart failure from October to July, when he died.  My wife was pregnant the entire time with our youngest son.  Dad got to see Scott when he was 2 weeks old.  Two weeks later we had him baptized, and the day after Dad was put on the critical list and the day after that he died. I firmly believe Dad lived to see his third grandchild baptized to God’s care and love.  I also believe that when he baptism was complete, he felt a gentle tap on the shoulder  and was told that he didn’t’ have to hold on any longer, that his race on earth could now be completed.

But I digress form my story.  The day he died I had to go in early to work to get our pilot machine started.  As I sat in the kitchen getting my lunch organized, I saw the shadows in the kitchen move very distinctly.  No vehicle had passed outside.  I got to work at 6 and  a half hour later my brother called and told me Dad had died. 

When we got to the funeral home later that day, I asked the F.D. what time was on Dad’s death certificate.  He told me 6AM.  I told him I thought it was a little before that.

HOW I CAME TO McADOO ASSOCIATES

We were living in McAdoo around the time McAdoo Associates became active in he mid 70s. I was working at the Purolator Oil Filter plant outside Ringtown.  I had been hired to be trained as second shift quality supervisor but as it turned out only had to spend occasional time on a second shift, when we were building aircraft oil filters, which as you might suspect, were made to much tighter standards than the equivalent auto filter.

My boss, the quality manager, had decided to resign and move back to Iowa, where he had come from when that plant had been shuttered.  I essentially did his job and mine for over a year, and never had gotten any complaints.  But in that time we had acquired a new division quality director, and when he was ready to fill the quality manager position, I was told I would not be considered.  I saw that as the same as telling me that I could not advance where I was at. 

Prior to the above phone call by several months, I had acquired a portable water testing kit, and had been doing some ad hoc testing for McAdoo Associates.  Since I had been given the message that I would help train the quality manager replacement and that he would be over me, I convinced the owner of McAdoo Associates he needed me full time.  As you will see in subsequent entries, most of the time want I did was only related to testing by the slimmest of threads, but it paid a little better than Purolator and it was only about 3 miles from home so that helped.

AGMET

The next future Super Fund site I had contact with I actually worked at.

Agmet had been started to reprocess the silver nitrate from obsolete x-rays back into silver. The basic process was to use an acid bath to strip the silver nitrate from the x-rays and process it back into silver electrolyticly. 

I answered an ad right after New Years Day 1973 for a chemist.  I had been laid off from the research lab at General Foam at the end of the year and my wife was pregnant with who proved to be our oldest son, Kyle.  They had bought an atomic absorption spectrophotometer(AAS) and all the necessary accessories, with the idea they would be able to tell when an electrolytic bat, of which they had several, was loaded up on silver and should be changed.

They wanted someone temporary who could set it up and get it running and then train their main lab technician, who didn’t know anything about AASs, to operate it.  At that pointing my life I had not been out of work so many times or so long that I was desperate enough to take something that was not intended to be permanent, but I thought why not.  I had run one at Allentown Testing Labs right out of college, and as it turned out, Manny, the man who ran the plant, knew nothing about them, which turned into an advantage for me I suppose.

Anyway I wasn’t hired off the interview and went back home.  I think they didn’t want to have to pay someone with a degree.  Anyhow after about 3 weeks, I hadn’t found anything else, and told my wife that they were not going to get too many people in off the street that knew anything about AASs, a sit was  a comparatively new technology at the time, so I called them back and yes, they hadn’t gotten anyone and I should come back in for  a talk.  I got the job.

I found out years later that their location, between Lofty and Delano (named after the family of FDR’s mother, who had coal lands in the area years ago) southwest of McAdoo, Pa., had been put on the Super Fund list.  I think it may have been abandoned at some point by the owners with a lot of acids and plastic x-ray substrate sheets left lying around.

A foot note to this story.  Many years later I came into possession of the AAS I had been asked to set up at Agmet, how is not germane to the present discussion. It was long since rendered not usable by years of abandonment, but I still have it.

ECHO CHEMICAL/DeREWAL CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

As and addendum to the last post, the DeRewals brothers were wanted in several states for the practice of midnight dumping.  They would take a tanker of waste chemicals, stop along the road and open the drain a crack and drive off dripping whatever was in the tank out into the environment, where you or I would get it on ourselves or wonder why we had these spots on the finish of our cars.

ECHO CHEMICAL/DeREWAL CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

The next Super Fund site I was associated with was the Echo Chemical/DeRewal Chemical location in Revere, Pa.  on the south side of 611 between the bend at the road to Upper Black Eddy and the 412 turn off to the right.

Norbert and Manfred DeRewal operated several companies and locations, the facility in revere being one of them.  There were others in New Jersey and North Carolina, where I understand they were from.

Typically their companies took in spent industrial amounts of acids, such as those used in pickling baths, and either disposed of them or as in the case of the Revere location, used acid baths to strip the copper off rejected and obsolete printed circuit boards.

At Revere they had a large number of outdoor, unlined lagoons holding thousands of gallons of these waste acids, some of which were leaking into local surface water streams.

Dr. Crockett, my faculty adviser at Lafayette, asked me to go along with he and an undergraduate whose name I have forgotten, to Revere for an initial look-see at the location, which was not secure at that time.  I don’t’ know if he asked me just because he wanted another student involved, or if it was because I was familiar with the area, had my own car, and could provide transportation to the fellow who was actually investigating Echo for a project. Dr. Crockett drove us down the first time, which was going to be just to see what it was we would be dealing with.

The site had been abandoned by the DeRewals at some point before we went there the first time.  The office had been thoroughly vandalized and what office papers that hadn’t been removed by the owners were strewn around the floor, and what laboratory equipment had been left was smashed on the floor of the lab. A building next to the lab which had a leaky roof had several uncovered drums containing some sort of powder.  The other student and I mapped the lagoons so we would have enough sample containers when we came back to do sampling.

I don’t’ know much about the subsequent history of the site, or the efforts it took to clean it up, but if you drive past it now it is covered with brush and small trees and fenced in.  There are old newspaper reports online that provide more details about the cleanup.

PENNSALT CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

Over the course of my childhood I have had the ‘pleasure’ of having connections to 4 industrial locations that subsequently were put on the Super Fund list – one that I grew up near, one I assisted one of my friends investigate during the years I attended Lafayette College, majoring in Chemistry, and 2 I actually worked for.  I gather working for Super Fund sites was and is an occupational hazard of chemists.

I grew up near a small industrial site that housed a former PennSalt Chemical facility.  In the years after the site was abandoned by PennSalt, parts of it were occupied by a shooting range for a local gun club, Deal Products, which manufactured industrial scaffolding, Wyatt Automotive, and buildings used for storage by Brownie the Junkman and by an unlined landfill.

I grew up on the last street south in South Easton, Pennsylvania and we could see the industrial area that included the abandoned PennSalt plant from our house about a half mile away.  The PennSalt plant had been abandoned when PennSalt moved whatever it was that was produced there to a plant in Bristol.  My neighbor Roy Schirner, who worked there in a capacity unknown to me, moved there with his wife, and her sister, who lived with them up the street.

There were a number of buildings abandoned when PennSalt made their move, but the material they left in large heaps on their property most likely contributed to the site’s designation on the Super Fund list.  I remember it as being gray to white and not all that heavy.  One area where some had obviously removed was where the gun club has their shooting range. As children we would actually play around on these heaps of material with no apparent harm. 

In later years, Chrin’s started a local landfill there, unlined in the late 50s, and that contributed to the Super Fund designation probably more than the chemical plant.  I remember driving past that landfill on a windy day and seeing the fence rows festooned with trash that sometimes blew out of the landfill faster than they could cover it with earth. 

This is not the same identical location as the lined landfill Chrin operates on another part of the site presently.  The current landfill is operated by current landfill regulations and does not exhibit the smells or other problems of the first landfill.  They can only take so much in a day and has to be covered to the specified depth by the end of the day.  There are monitoring wells for water quality and methane gas, a byproduct of all landfills, at various locations in the immediate area. 

The size this landfill has grown to, serving a small area as it does, indicates to me that we have to come up with a better way of handling municipal waste, whether it be recycling any waste there is a use for, or finding ways to produce less household and industrial waste.  I think incineration with scrubbers on the flue gas is the way to go.  Resulting would be an inert ash that if land filled would take up far less space than what is currently placed into landfills. Of course this ash would need to be continuously tested, so chemists like me would be needed.  Many of the tests can be automated or done with instruments.

AN ENCOUNTER ON AN ICY, SNOWY ROAD

One of my earlier blogs concerned a pocket watch my father got for Christmas one year from the owner of a greenhouse he worked for as  a teenager.  This next one occurred several years later, when he wa sin his early 20s.

One of his jobs was to drive the owner's Pierce Arrow truck to Philly to Third and Arch Sts. to pick up flowers and supplies.  This was a round trip of about 3 hours on a good day and that included getting the truck loaded.  I have driven to Philly on the roads before the Doylestown bypass was completed and I cna't imagine how fast he had to be driving.

It was  a snowy day, and while the truck had a heater of sorts to protect the flowers, it didn't' have a defroster, which meant he had to stop every few miles and scrape the windows so he could see to drive.  Somewhere below Doylestown he stopped to pick up a hitchhiking salesman, who proved to want to get to Easton also.  he was one of these salesmen I remember from my youth.  They come around door to door and have just about anything in a huge trunk they carry with them.

After seeing Dad stop every few miles to scrape the windows, he said that he had something in his case that would help.  Dad started thinking he could have a gun in the case for all he knew.  The man opened his case and pulled out a stick of something lie mustache wax or butch wax, got out and smeared it on the windshield and side windows. Dad had no more icy buildup to deal with for the rest of the trip.