Everything under the sun was in pits. If anyone had storm containment it became a swimming pool due to the storm surge or the rain,” says John Cambre, corporate secretary and water plant and regulatory compliance manager for WOCI. “One of our clients’ excellent water plants was completely inundated. We’ve started treating all of his water for him.”
Though in the first two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, this waste oil and wastewater treatment company didn’t have any more than three or four clients using its services, Cambre has found that some people’s wastestreams are now starting to come back to pre-storm levels.
But the cleanup continues, and WOCI is now dealing with many soaps and degreasers in the wastestreams it treats. WOCI’s system—featuring separate cells rather than one big aerated tank—allows Cambre to better control the quality of his water samples and the degradation rates. “Something containing glycols or machining oil would necessarily need a longer treatment than bilgewater or a stormwater sample,” says Cambre. “I can ‘cell things up’ and treat those waters the way they need to be treated.”
The company was lucky during the hurricane in that it was north of the railroad tracks, which formed something of a dike to protect the property. “The damage we received during the hurricane was nothing we couldn’t deal with,” says Cambre. “Katrina struck on a Monday. Our company was back up and running with emergency generators by Thursday. In the beginning things were shaky. Our air system went down and a whole new one had to be installed. Replacement equipment was especially difficult to get at that time.”
As a pretreating company, WOCI has to outflow its water somewhere, such as a wastewater authority, many of which were down after the hurricane.
“It’s a different world since Katrina,” says Dan Cambre, business manager for WOCI. “One of our biggest competitors, in New Orleans, had been there for 50 years as a major player. Now they’re underwater and have lost all their trucks. I don’t even know if they’re going to open that facility back up again. We’ve gotten some of their former business. The rest of the cleanup efforts involve everyone imaginable. There are tanks, boats, barges, and all kinds of stuff still tossed up on the shore everywhere—and many still contain fuel.”
In those first few weeks following Katrina, WOCI did a lot of fuel-tank cleaning so that gas stations could get going again. It also pumped quite a few generator tanks for businesses trying to reopen.
In the wake of the storm, WOCI is doing work, as always, for the state of Mississippi and the state spill-response contractors, which are private companies chiefly involved in spills.
 |
| WOCI is currently running ten 10,000-gallon cells and six storage tanks and is processing oily wastewaters at all times. |
Cambre went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast Wastewater Authority and did whatever he could to help it get up and running again, including getting its lift stations back in action. “It has been a struggle since the hurricane,” he says. “What didn’t go underwater got saltwater on it and inside of it. My blower motors first had pumps go out, then motors go out. We finally had to go to a list to give people an idea of when we would be able to come and help them out.”
The detection of bis-phthalate, an organic chemical used as a plasticizer, is in WOCI’s permit regulations. Bis-phthalate is a carrier or solvent within the plastics field. Normally it would be going out as a volatile organic compound (VOC). There is a set limit on the amount of this chemical allowable in Cambre’s samples, as there is with a number of other VOCs. Permit cycles run for five years, and within the last four years, until Katrina, Cambre had never detected any bis-phthalate in his samples. But shortly after Katrina he began to see “bumps” of this substance showing up in his analytical data reports. “We have no clue as to why this is turning up,” he says. “I suspect it has something to do with some of these manufacturing plants being washed out during the storm.
“It used to be when you pumped out a shrimp boat you knew what you’d have: basically seawater. Now after the hurricane the boats are 100 yards from the beach, flipped over on the land, and full of water. You have no clue what they contain.”
WOCI is a family-run business started by John and Dan Cambre’s father some 25 years ago. Now each of the three Cambre sons has a clearly defined role in the business. Dan runs the business end of WOCI, while John runs the wastewater treatment plant, and Andrew runs the waste oil treatment plant. In the past 12 years the three brothers have taken the business from one truck and driver to 10 trucks and six drivers. “We have a real niche market here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as there is also a great deal of industry in this area in need of our services,” says Dan.
Approximately 40% of the company’s business comes from the water plant, due largely to the large maritime presence on the Gulf Coast. Twenty percent of WOCI’s business comes from sales of re-processed oils and the other 40% from a variety of other services, including business from its five vacuum trucks, processing of “street oil” from quick car-lube businesses and oil from various other shops.
Dan Cambre credits much of the development of WOCI’s unique water-processing system to his father. “Our method of operation is really just a basic process, but we’re ahead with it because we’ve been around so long—‘grandfathered in,’ so to speak. If you were to start from scratch—get the land, build the needed plants, and get all the necessary permits involved—you’d have to go a long way. To show how far things have come, before my dad got into this business he had a full-service gas station. Then he would simply dump the waste oil in a ditch out in front of the gas station. A lot of people did that. But he saw a growing need with all the environmental laws starting to come on. Our growth and development over the past several decades accompanies the ongoing expansion in the nation’s environmental laws. We are closely involved with EPA and with some Superfund cleanups. That’s another part of the reason we are here.”
Cambre also credits the National Oil Recyclers Association (NORA), an organization of responsible recyclers. From the start, NORA has been a tremendous help in keeping WOCI informed of new industry developments.
When John Cambre started with WOCI, it had two 10,000-gallon water treatment tanks. Now he is running ten 10,000-gallon cells and six storage tanks and is processing oily wastewaters at all times. In addition to environmentally recycling oily wastes, Cambre also recycles wastewaters, filters, rags, and even soils.
WOCI is an Oil Spill Response support company. “We have booms, pads, trained people and equipment,” says Cambre. “There are no other OSROs between Mobile and New Orleans. If someone has an oil spill, we will be one of the first there to contain it and keep that going until the company that is going to do the actual cleanup shows up. A lot of times if it’s a small spill, we’ll have it completely cleaned up before anyone gets there.”
WOCI also recycles used oils, hydraulic fluids, bilgewaters, spill containments, stormwaters, and oil-water separator maintenance fluids. “Most recyclers do strictly crankcase oils,” says Cambre. “But we can work with anything from gasoline to No. 6 oil.” The sources of these oils can be anything from car washes, machining shops, and shipyards (including the ships themselves) to gas-station storage tanks and parking-lot interceptors. WOCI has hundreds of clients, from the mom-and-pop car wash to a vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, and has done a lot of work with the casino barges in Biloxi. Some of these have generators, elevator shafts, and bilge pumps onboard that require the changing of oil and adding of fuel. “There is always some form of oily water or waste that we can help with,” explains Cambre.
WOCI ships out the processed oil to be used as various types of fuels. The oil filters, oil drums, and tank bottoms are all recycled too, as are any other related trash or sludge. Sludge is solidified before being sent off for thermal treatment. Very little of any material handled is sent to landfills. “Most of what we do is driven by our clients,” says Cambre. “They want certificates, so we use a thermal treatment rather than a landfill. We are also Coast Guard-approved and have EPA approval for different sites, in addition to carrying insurances for DOT and Hazmat transportation.”
After Katrina, many wastewater systems in the region were down and waiting for parts, as the hurricane had completely washed their plants out. WOCI has been able to handle all those companies’ industrial wastewaters.
“I make the wastewater amenable to my parameters in my onsite water treatment plant and then send it back out,” says Cambre. “It is basically recycling the water. We will also have companies that tell us they are having a new wastewater system built, but in the meantime they ask if we can handle their wastewater needs. That’s a scenario we deal with too.”
Last year WOCI treated 2.5 million gallons of wastewater. It pretreats to national standards before the wastewater goes on to a public wastewater authority’s sewer plant. WOCI removes the oil, and the final cleanup is handled by the public sewer plant. “The water is in pretty good shape when it leaves us,” says Cambre. “In a nutshell, we deal with the water no one else can handle. We deal a lot with bilge water and marine water. Somebody has to do it. We’re here and are one of the few in the state of Mississippi. There are a lot of pretreaters for industry, but there are very few commercial pretreaters. WOCI is one of the few biological treaters anywhere in the country.
“The oils that come to WOCI contain from 1% water content to 70% water. Oils are consolidated and nearly all are sold for an alternative boiler fuel used in asphalt plants, paper mills, and cement kilns. We could break them down to base oils, but that’s complicated, expensive and a big capital investment. Therefore, the market for us is boiler fuels.”
Most onsite water treatment involves a steady, predictable wastestream, according to Cambre. An “off-the-shelf” system can be installed which will take care of that plant’s treatment needs 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time, that waste may be sent to an offsite water processor. Instead of one wastestream, WOCI will often have 20 different wastestreams coming into its plant. The challenge to be able to pick the organisms that are best used with each type of wastewater the company comes across.
“I am constantly watching what comes in,” says Cambre. “We especially look at things like pH, COD [chemical oxygen demand], types of cleaners used, and types of oils that the wastewater has come in contact with. Practically every truckload we receive is different in some way from every other.”
When a sample comes in, a test and a profile are run. Three different varieties of biological tests are also run. Cambre can pick one of those tests and match it directly to what the wastestream is in his treatment tank. The only thing he does not deal with is metals.
Often when the water arrives at the oil plant it will separate from the oil simply by sitting in the trucks coming into the plant. In those cases the water is pulled off and placed in another tank, where it sits for 24 hours of further gravity separation. “You always get some ‘phase separation’ just through the water and oil standing in the tanks,” says Cambre. “We will then pull the waters off and place them on the wastewater side of our plant.”
When heat-treating the oil, WOCI adds a chemical de-emulsifier that places even more water in the system. The water is tested, predominantly for COD and pH to figure out the best treatment. An aeration process continues before proper biologicals are added.
“We try to maintain the pH at about 7,” says John. “Depending on the quality of the water going in, the treatment may take from two days to two weeks. When the COD hits the proper limit, we precipitate any remaining waste oil out, turn the air off to let things settle, and then pull that water out.”
At this point a filtering process takes place with the water, involving a number of different filters, before the water is placed in the discharge tank. After the discharge tank, the water goes through one more filter and then into the carbon filter.
Cambre feels that the secret to his success in water treatment is the biological treatments he has used. Biological treatments are shipped to WOCI in drums from Osprey Biotechnics, based in Sarasota, FL. Ship oils are treated with Osprey’s Number One biologicals, a product for oils and greases. Tank-cleaning operations involve emulsifiers which cause the oil to hold in the water. When this happens, Cambre must first “break” the hold of the emulsion before he can break the oil away. In a case such as this he uses one biological to degrade the soaps—often containing such things as caustics, acids, thinners, and other organics—and then another biological to treat the rest of the water.
“Glycols are toughest to deal with,” says Cambre. “They’re very hard to break down. I have a biological that’s good at breaking glycols down. Most biologicals need nitrogen to break down the oils—or anything else. Wastewater plants tend to have a lot of nitrogen due to the human waste. But my plant’s waters are deficient in nitrates, so I have to supplement them. Knowing your biologicals and your wastestreams helps you to know when to add certain amendments to aid the biologicals in the breakdown.”
In addition to a small testing lab onsite, Cambre uses an EPA-certified lab, Micro-Methods Laboratories Inc., located five minutes from his plant. If any metals turn up, they will toxify Cambre’s biologicals and stop things up. MicroMethods helps with this evaluation.
“You never know what you’re getting from a client,” says Cambre. “You have to talk to your client about this, but many times your client doesn’t even know. This is where the testing comes in, and it’s very important on a big operation. The chemical supervisor may not even know that they’ve changed the chemical process in another part of their plant.”
Cambre says that working with RespirTek Inc., a Biloxi biological lab, has saved time. Instead of waiting for a dissolved oxygen (DO) or a degradation rate, Cambre found that RespirTek could give him the same data in 72 hours. “What I knew as anecdotal regarding my testing, RespirTek showed me on paper,” says Cambre. “I could also find even better ways to treat my wastestream and what kinds of time frames I could expect from my treatments. I use a specific type of biological, so I don’t need to know what is going on as much as what type of biological treatment to put in the water to clean that water up. I have three different biologicals that I use specifically designed for oily wastewaters. I was able to find out what worked best, what was normal, and what gave the best bang for my buck, by using RespirTek.
“I’ll admit that working on the respiration of the bacteria in my systems was not the first thing on my mind. But knowing what the biologicals could do, and knowing what was going on and what to expect, was a great help. There’s a definite learning curve involved. There are no books out there on how to do pretreatment of oily wastewaters. So for me it’s a new world each day with the different variables I see coming in all the time.”
WOCI is a permitted pretreater, so the water eventually must go to a publicly-owned treatment works. The local entity to which Gautier sends its wastewater is known as the Mississippi Gulf Regional Wastewater Authority, which operates all the wastewater plants in Jackson County. “Some of their plants went completely underwater with Katrina,” says Cambre. “They’d been doing a very fine job of treating waste for quite a while. But they’ve all really taken a hit with this latest storm. System Manager Kurt Miller has estimated $19 million in damage.”
Change is part of WOCI’s water plant on a yearly basis. New equipment, new technologies, and new filtration systems continually appear on the market. “I start looking at these things and wonder about ways they can be incorporated into our system to improve as we go along” says Cambre. “Also, with new federal regulations coming out all the time, there are continual changes as substances are found to be more or less toxic, driving parameters for those particular chemicals or metals up or down.”
As the chemical, cleaning, and oil industries change, Cambre must make sure that his system keeps up. “Biologicals need nitrogen, a stable pH, and a high amount of aeration to maintain a high level of dissolved oxygen. I have new equipment now to keep my DO up at about 3 or 4 mg per liter. If I get down too low I’ll starve my biologicals. Time is money and you don’t want to slow things down too much.
“We could probably double our business if we just took in everything. But if I know what my system will do and I stay within our little niche of the market, everything runs along pretty well.”
PETE HILDEBRANDT is a writer specializing in science and engineering topics.
OW - May/June 2006 |
