T2 Tanker middle of Indian Ocean. Port boiler has leaky boiler tubes and somebody has to go in Mud and Steam drum find and plug. Look around engine room crew all KP’s were to fat and I was 135 lbs soaking wet. The chief say’s looks like you can make it and in I go. The next 20 Hrs was hell, trying to find leaks and plug, thank God the second was good engineer and helped from the firebox. We were underway during this entire effort and engine room temp was never less then 110F, I still have night mares about being trapped in boiler, I survived , we were able to get boiler on line and deliver cargo of aviation gas to Viet Nam,
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Bank line a.k.a Andrew Weir and Sons and the port was that gem of the pacific- Port Moresby.
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You’d rather clean sewage equipment than hold a nice clean cup with some more or less sterile warm water in it? I find that surprising.
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I’ll take door number one.
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Either is better than greywater
Black or gray water is nothing compared to a rotten grease trap!
Just cranked up the wayback machine and watched a wild haired and profusely bearded wiper standing on top of the shit tank of an APL C-8 working on the grease trap. I was working on a winch motor-generator about 30 feet away when I heard a shout and a crash and turned to see the grease trap falling and spilling its contents over the head of the poor wiper.
About the same time as it registered what had happened the sight of the wiper covered with clots of fermented grease and who knows what else was accompanied by the impact of a wave of fumes that instantly started my stomach churning. The ladder out of the compartment was only about 10 feet away and I barely made it out before throwing up. The wiper was not so lucky.
It wasn’t my job to clean the grease trap but it has to be winner of the worst job contest. I’ll take a steam drum or firebox any day!
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Least favorite but probably also the funniest was dealing with the shit bagger (Solids Handling Unit) from Omni-Pure. We had two of these on the drill ship and they never worked from day one. In theory they’d take the settled solid MSD remnants, inject some polymer into the stream and pump it all to mesh bags that would drain the water off and leave you with clay like sanitized material. In reality it never worked and always overflowed because the water never drained out.
One time we had to go down and pull out all the overflowed bags and clean up the mess, again. Picture the 3rd pulling on a 50lb mesh bag of shit pudding with a perfect vacuum holding it in the tube, wearing chemical gloves, goggles, face shield and a chemical apron. Trying so hard to get the bag out that he looks like he just squatted 1,000lbs while on huge amounts of steroids and his veins are ready to explode. Then cue the roustabouts coming down with DOT drums to put this mess into. Never seen a group of guys throw up in their mouths and haul ass so fast in my life. Good times. Thank god my sense of smell isn’t perfect.
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I was Day 3rd on a Delta Lines ship my second ship on my license. The ship was split house with the Mates and crew living forward and the Engineers aft. On my first morning the First said to go see the Chief, he has a job for you. Once I found the Chief he led me to the sewage room under the forward house. He pointed to bunch of valves telling me to open those and close those. As I was spinning valves he explained something plugged up the shit chopper (macerator) on the inlet to the sewage tank. My job was to take off the macerator’s side access plate so we could find the obstruction. Standing on a step ladder I removed the access plate bolts and started to tap on the plate to break the gasket seal. As I was tapping away the Chief said, “Be careful, there might be a little pressure.” At that very moment the plate blew off and the entire contents of the line from the Captains deck on down emptied out on me. I was covered in shit and toilet paper. The Chief started laughing so hard he nearly pissed himself. I stood there dumbfounded. I assumed all the valves I had either opened or close bypassed the macerator, but apparently not so. After rinsing off with a hose I went to my stateroom and stood under a shower clothes and all. A couple of days later I was sick as a dog.
An important lesson was learned that day…Chief’s direct and supervise but don’t have to work on (touch) sewage systems. I took that to heart when I became Chief and was always very leery around those things.
I was told later it was mop strings and bars of soap that plugged the macerator that eventful morning.
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If it makes you feel any better, nothing much has changed. Macerators still get clogged. The last instance I remember hearing about involved cigarette butts and half a lemon. Haven’t heard about the shit baths yet though. Mercifully.
one advantage of blue water… you can just run it over the side (most of the time)!!
and then there are the vacume systems… sometimes subject to positive pressure, as in how to paint a state room brown?
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The culprit on yachts and head boats is often sanitary napkins.
As long as this thread is going down the toilet, I was on a yacht getting repairs done at Rybovich and Spencer in West Palm Beach (known to the locals as Rob the Rich and Spend it). Next to us was a 60’ Hatteras that was there to clear clogged black water flow. This is how the yard guys put it:
The owner dropped the boat off and a while later, his wife came to see what the problem was. Turns out the pipes and macerators in the master stateroom were clogged with condoms. She did some investigating and found out her husband had been spending his spare time dipping his pen in the secretarial inkwell on the boat.
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As we seem to be talking about s—t - Ferry on the English Channel, we used squeegy mops not string mops on board as the complete heads often ended in the sewage system, causing blockages. Company sold and new owners didn’t have squeegy mops in their stores. I asked the Senior Old Man to do something about it a number of times and he said we had to put up with the problem. On morning while he was on the bridge I put a large plastic bag filled with the contents of a sewage filter in the middle of his desk and went back down below to help clean up the mess. Squeegy mops arrived the next day and we saw no more of string mops. I never did hear any more about the mess on his desk.
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On a research ship with a large complement of scientists and techs aboard and most of those not the same from expedition to expedition the steep learning curve of the finer points of sanitation at sea was becoming unbearable one trip when the curve was bending more towards effort and less towards proper use and operation. In a similar vein to @Howard1 a simple visual display was prepared and posted in the passageway. It remained there for a few days aging. Though there was a trash can next to each of the 57 heads on that ship people would still flush q-tips and dental floss. So much of the latter on one expedition one of the ejector pumps had to be taken apart and the floss unspooled from behind the impeller where is took out the seal. The kids some people raise.
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Sewage and Tank dives,
All this talk reminds me of that time I was new on board, and didn’t get the whole deal with that valve on the 5" pipe from the deck level toilet to the holding tank. It was frozen, and of course I didn’t bother freeing it up - what could it be for anyway? - until we hit heavy weather with a half full tank. It turns out that two tons of shit sloshing around can create violent pressure spikes, and thus I had accidentally created the surprise enema machine.
I’m not sure why I took pictures of the aftermath, but there it is - don’t click if you’re encumbered with such things as taste and class: Disgusting Visuals
The whole room was coated in a fine layer of brown mist, and I’m pretty sure that the cleanup was someone’s least favorite job.
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Had much the same experience. We had a laminated sign for each head. “ Nothing other than stuff you haven’t eaten and toilet paper are to be disposed off in this toilet.”
We had similar signs in the heads on a recreational 26 passenger live-aboard dive boat. The trips were a week long so a constant new batch of divers had to be reminded in the pre-departure briefing every week. Still, dealing with clogged heads was a constant headache. With a 24 hour turnaround and 4 dives a day in different locations for 6 days straight, our time for maintenance was limited so we ended up pressurizing the pipes to speed the process when trying to unclog them.
One day I went to the doorway of a head to see how the deckhand unclogging a pipe under pressure was doing. It was the exact moment that the pipe burst and both of us got sprayed by a shit storm.
Seems like a universal least favorite job.
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Unfortunately for me, my shit showers all happened while sailing as CE. . . . although, after my first one, I did delegate the clearing of the clean out to my assistants, with dire warnings that were rarely heeded. . . . I witnessed more than one run out on deck to puke over the side after the job. . . .
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I’ve had countless shit-hand, shit-boots, shit-sleeve, shit-showers & I think all of them were worse than handling warm piss in a plastic bottle wearing latex gloves in a controlled environment. But the reason working on the black & grey water systems don’t rank in the top 5 of my least favorite jobs is because coming in contact with shit & shit water can be mitigated by using PPE & experience. Better yet, most sewage plants can be modified with additional valves, T’s, blowdowns, traps, vents, splash guards, catch trays, vacuum pumps & other ingenious ideas to minimizes the times a person has to come in contact with shit. The best part about working on the shitter is it can usually be fixed in an hour or two during the same watch. When the shit job is finished, it’s finished. Personnel problems are still the worst because they can last for days, weeks & even years to never be fixed. Some personnel problems can be put into the unfixable category where everyone just lives with it until a person retires, gets fired, quits or dies. I’ve never tied one on, thought about quitting or dreaded going back to work over a MSD problem.
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Speaking of Head Maintenance… My Father told us a story during WW2; he was a Pharmacist Mate on USS Samuel Chase, a Coast Guard manned troop ship. One time they picked up a company of female French nurses. Within a day, several of the heads were plugged up… My father, being “from the bayou” spoke french, so he had the job of explaining to the nurses to use the trash cans provided by the heads. He was glad not to have to clear the clogs!
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