Golden Mud

I guess all my posts about my buggy are a bit too boring. At least that's the gist I got from my wife's comment on my last post. She asked, "Are you just going to write about your buggy?" I thought maybe I would, but I guess I won't. So here it goes on another topic.

Golden Mud. One of the many pleasures of owning car washes is the sludge you get to deal with. I like to call it golden mud. To think of it this way makes it less annoying when you have to do something with it. Unless you've handled it before you're probably wondering what on earth I'm talking about. Next time you wash your car in a self serve bay or an automatic look at the floor in the center of the bay. There you'll find one of the treasure chests that holds/collects the golden mud. It may look like a storm grate you see in a city street. You can drive on it, stand on it, drop things in between the metal bars, some people dump their used motor oil in it late at night, some don't even wait for night time. It's basically the local dumping ground for liquids and small items.
These treasure chests all vary in size. Most of them are about 3 to 4 feet deep by about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long. A pretty good size treasure chest if you ask me. They are usually made of concrete and have a 4 or 6 inch pipe coming out of them near the top where the water drains off to another series of even larger treasure chest buried under asphalt in the parking lot/drive way. These larger treasure chests fill up much slower because the idea is that most of the gold mud will settle in the first chest. However as the dirty water flows from chest to chest it carries with it bits and pieces of debris that settles along the way.

As time goes by this golden mud builds up and gets deeper and deeper until it can eventually block your outlets. This results in a flooded bay because the water cannot properly exit the system. When this happens you know it's time to clean out the treasure chest. Most car wash owners will hire a pump truck company to come and pump it out and dispose of it properly. We like to do ours ourselves. Not really, but it's cheaper and you can't beat the smell of it all. Believe it or not this is something you want to have happen as often as possible because it means you're washing a lot of cars. Thus comes the term "Golden Mud."

My first experience with this golden mud came in the summer of 2007. We had owned our car washes for about 3 months and then our bays started flooding. We thought it would be handy to just clean them out with a shovel and a five gallon bucket. That may be the hardest most back breaking work known to man. Not to mention how sloppy, dirty, messy, smelly it is and there is no way in the world to avoid getting it all over you. That worked as a short term fix to keep the water flowing.

I like to run equipment. I always have. From a very young age I liked to run equipment to do a job. I remember using my Tonka front end loader to try and clean up the Christmas tree pine needles off of the floor when my dad hauled it outside after the season. It didn't work very well, but it was better then doing it by hand. Anyway after unclogging 4 of these clogged bays with a shovel, I thought to myself, "Self...there's a better way." I rented a mini-excavator and used it to fill my skid steer bucket and then dumped that in a vacant lot down the street. It wasn't any less messy, in fact it splashed probably a whole lot higher, but the back breaking work was removed and you can't discount the entertainment value of getting to run equipment. That worked marvelously. We did it that way probably 3 or 4 times over the past year. When I got into the excavation business a little more this past spring I bought a dump truck and a mini-excavator so I don't even have to rent a machine or dump it illegally on somebody else's lot.

A week ago, we discovered that whenever the automatic ran, water would shoot out of the sewer man hole which is the lid on one of the buried treasure chests in the asphalt. That is a bad sign. That means that your treasure chests in the parking area are full of mud and nothing is draining to the sewer system. Dealing with this problem isn't so easy. While these are larger treasure chests, the openings are 24 inch round sewer man hole covers. The only way to clean these out is to suck the mud out. Just for your information, a trash pump is not the best way to do this. It's fine for the water, but it takes forever to get the mud out. My brother Tabor and I cleaned out a large underground settling tank like this at our truck wash, so I knew it could be done. We gave it a whirl on this tank/treasure chest and it wasn't so easy.

First keep in mind these chests have about 300-400 gallons of water in them on top of the mud. We had it set up to pump into my dump truck but we were letting the water just run by into our storm drain. We pumped and pumped and pumped until we finally discovered that the outlets for our larger treasure chests were located about a foot off of the bottom. Which explains why they filled up and clogged so easily. What a horrible design.

I was on my hands and knees, covered with mud and muck working on keeping the pump primed so it would keep pumping when all of a sudden I heard someone yelling at me over the roar of the motor running our trash pump. I looked up and there was a little old man that was bright red in the face with anger. He kept yelling at me about filling up something and how I was going to clean up something or he was going to kick my beeep-beeep or see my beeep-beeep in court. I was really confused in the first place to be startled like that out of nowhere, but then this little old man who maybe tips the scales at a buck 10 soaking wet standing over me threatening me...well I finally had enough so I stood up and asked him to explain a little clearer what he was so upset about. The top of his bright red head hit me about a little below chest level. He toned down quite a bit, but still was visibly disturbed. We walked over and he showed me the source of all his red fury. The water we'd been pumping out had filled up our storm drain and it was now spilling over and running down the street and it had filled up a drain box that collects water off of the back street behind our wash and then distributes it out into a modified french drain. He apparently thought our pump was doing a better job then it was because he was certain we had filled his tank with mud. Besides being really mad he was snapping pictures of everything and here I was looking all a mess for the photo shoot!

I argued with him about the mud issue and assured him it was just filled beyond it's capacity with water. He threatened to whip up on me again and I told him he better not pick a fight he couldn't win. Then he told me he was just going to sue me. That sounded like fun. Then before I knew it the Mayor of Payson showed up, followed by several public works employees for the city. They were also taking a bunch of pictures. Had I known we were going to have a city council meeting I would have brought some of my proposals for the strip mall we want to build down on our other car wash sites. Most of them didn't find that very humorous as it was about 7 pm when this all transpired and I'm sure they weren't just wrapping up their days on the job. Anyway I told Mr. grumpy that we'd pump his tank out and he assured me he would be checking it.
So after we pumped his out, we pumped our storm drain out and then finished our other tanks. All and all it was a blissful 14 hour day and our car wash should be ready for the dirty hunting season. I love dirty four wheelers...those guys spend a lot of time cleaning those up. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with a little golden mud.