Summer of 1993 - Inside Duties

 Here's where a spent a huge amount of time on the days I was not collecting samples or cleaning culverts. This is the lab trailer.

I tried to look up all the tests I did on every single sample bottle. I'm not sure I have them all, but based on some old spreadsheets, I think it was pH, conductivity, BOD (biological oxygen demand), total Phosphorus, Chlorides, and ammonia. I don't remember much about a lot of it... you just follow the "recipe" in the Standard Operating Procedures manual. Phosphorus and Chlorides required chemical reactions. The picture I recently posted on Facebook, and put last in this post, of me doing chemical analysis was a Phosphorus test... there was one step in there where you had to let the sample turn pink with the addition of drops of reagent. That picture, of course, was in a much nicer lab.

This is one of the stations that I only had to do an instrument reading. And I tried to count the bottles. It does look like 27 or 28. Of course, there was a big backlog of samples to be tested when I got there. Someone else had done collecting and filled the refrigerator with bottles, but they were waiting for the grunt grad assistant to show up to do the tests.

And putting that instrument to use.

Looks about the same, but maybe this one is conductivity. I have a vague memory of what that instrument looked like

Well, doing this over and over got pretty boring, but it was part of the job, and I got a lot of satisfaction out of doing a good job and preparing the graphs showing that the water quality improved as the water flowed through the ponds.

The very worst part of the job was that after testing was complete, all the sample bottles had to be acid washed to remove all traces of the previous water. This means they got washed with soapy water and a brush, rinsed, then a squirt of concentrated sulfuric acid went in each bottle, swished around and rinsed again. Then they were air dried. The acid was in a squirt bottle, but I kept dedicated clothes for all the acid washing, because you were sure to get holes in your clothing.

Where was Chips when I was doing all this? Well, you know, he was a great lab assistant.

That fall, when I went back to U of M, I began as the project coordinator for the constructed wetlands at Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor. I did a post about that. After that was built and functioning, it involved doing all those same tests, collecting monthly samples for five years and doing all that lab work. That's where this picture was taken.

Somewhere here, I want to say that this was all under the instruction of Dr. Robert Kadlec. He was one of the pioneer researchers in demonstrating the capabilities of wetlands to remediate contaminated water. He literally wrote the book on the topic. I was thrilled to be working with him, and that all went well, but my difficulties at U of M came about because I was getting my degree in a different department from his. It's a long, stupid story. Some my fault, some not my fault, but the end result was that "my" department didn't want me. It happens. Grad school can be brutal.

Tomorrow, I get to play outside all day so I'll blog about that. But we'll come back to 1993 for at least one more day after that.

In other news: I finished the big editing job and am making good progress on the trail book.

See Other Outside Duties