Mixing it up

Tony Shelton

BS Detector, Esquire
At the Tri-State Seminar for Storm water regulators in Las Vegas with Jill Shelton and Carlos Gonzales.

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So I asked Jill what was the most surprising thing about the seminar so far and she said "that with all the mention of pollution sources we we never mentioned at all."

Carlos said something similar.

What does that tell you guys? I believe that we would have never been on the radar except in rare cases had we not put ourselves out there.

I spoke with a the consultant in charge of writing design changes for parking lots. I discovered that this was what Robert was talking about when he texted me back in March and told me that new regulations would be going into effect for power washers in November.

He either completely misunderstood what was on the table for November or intentionally told me the wrong thing.

In November there is a deadline for submitting new regs for parking lot construction.

I asked the consultant if they had considered plaza cleaning runoff issues when designing new parking lots and she said they had not thought about that. So now I have a meeting with her in early November to bring in some ideas.

One thing would be to consider locating the natural runoff stream from sidewalks and putting in a temporarily removable section of curb that could be taken out when cleaning and replaced when done.

That way the runoff could be gravity filtered at the cutout and diverted to landscaping so it never leaves the property. Depending on the size and quantity of the estimated runoff there could be a small area at the cutout with further pretreatment built in if necessary.

This is what I plan to bring
to her in November for consideration.

Any other suggestions?

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So I asked Jill what was the most surprising thing about the seminar so far and she said "that with all the mention of pollution sources we we never mentioned at all."

Carlos said something similar.

What does that tell you guys? I believe that we would have never been on the radar except in rare cases had we not put ourselves out there.

I spoke with a the consultant in charge of writing design changes for parking lots. I discovered that this was what Robert was talking about when he texted me back in March and told me that new regulations would be going into effect for power washers in November.

He either completely misunderstood what was on the table for November or intentionally told me the wrong thing.

In November there is a deadline for submitting new regs for parking lot construction.

I asked the consultant if they had considered plaza cleaning runoff issues when designing new parking lots and she said they had not thought about that. So now I have a meeting with her in early November to bring in some ideas.

One thing would be to consider locating the natural runoff stream from sidewalks and putting in a temporarily removable section of curb that could be taken out when cleaning and replaced when done.

That way the runoff could be gravity filtered at the cutout and diverted to landscaping so it never leaves the property. Depending on the size and quantity of the estimated runoff there could be a small area at the cutout with further pretreatment built in if necessary.

This is what I plan to bring
to her in November for consideration.

Any other suggestions?

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This is very encouraging. Things like this cost almost nothing to do and the impact can be significant.
 
A lot of the larger stores like Lowe's, Wal Mart and others have retention ponds where the runoff from the parking lot goes besides the dry wells so that nothing will ever reach the US Bodies of water, maybe a good idea to have small retention ponds for the garages and on occasion have a cleaning/maintenance crew go there to pickup trash and trim the weeds that will grow in there.
 
So I asked Jill what was the most surprising thing about the seminar so far and she said "that with all the mention of pollution sources we we never mentioned at all."

Carlos said something similar.

What does that tell you guys? I believe that we would have never been on the radar except in rare cases had we not put ourselves out there.

I spoke with a the consultant in charge of writing design changes for parking lots. I discovered that this was what Robert was talking about when he texted me back in March and told me that new regulations would be going into effect for power washers in November.

He either completely misunderstood what was on the table for November or intentionally told me the wrong thing.

In November there is a deadline for submitting new regs for parking lot construction.

I asked the consultant if they had considered plaza cleaning runoff issues when designing new parking lots and she said they had not thought about that. So now I have a meeting with her in early November to bring in some ideas.

One thing would be to consider locating the natural runoff stream from sidewalks and putting in a temporarily removable section of curb that could be taken out when cleaning and replaced when done.

That way the runoff could be gravity filtered at the cutout and diverted to landscaping so it never leaves the property. Depending on the size and quantity of the estimated runoff there could be a small area at the cutout with further pretreatment built in if necessary.

This is what I plan to bring
to her in November for consideration.

Any other suggestions?

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk 2


So, if I am understanding this correctly and please correct me if I am wrong, Most cities out there are using a common sense approach to dealing with rain runoff and this has been going along great but with some people out there misrepresenting themselves, saying things that are not true, trying to lie, harass and manipulate city officials and regulators to get more restrictions in parts of the country that they don't live in, don't work in and have no business at all being there, the cities don't know why these people are doing these things but it is obvious to them that they are wanting tougher restrictions for pressure cleaning contractors for some unknown reason?

It is great that the city officials and regulators can see through the nonsense and B.S. that these people are trying to pull.

Thanks for what you are doing out there Tony, it is nice that the people in charge out there have common sense and don't fall the the lies, B.S. and manipulation that strange people out there are trying to pull with them to get tougher regulations for pressure washing contractors for no reason.
 
So, if I am understanding this correctly and please correct me if I am wrong, Most cities out there are using a common sense approach to dealing with rain runoff and this has been going along great but with some people out there misrepresenting themselves, saying things that are not true, trying to lie, harass and manipulate city officials and regulators to get more restrictions in parts of the country that they don't live in, don't work in and have no business at all being there, the cities don't know why these people are doing these things but it is obvious to them that they are wanting tougher restrictions for pressure cleaning contractors for some unknown reason?

It is great that the city officials and regulators can see through the nonsense and B.S. that these people are trying to pull.

Thanks for what you are doing out there Tony, it is nice that the people in charge out there have common sense and don't fall the the lies, B.S. and manipulation that strange people out there are trying to pull with them to get tougher regulations for pressure washing contractors for no reason.

I met an enforcement officer from Northern California. He overheard me discussing parking lot runoff with the consultant. He asked if we were talking about parking garages. When I said no, he said. Those things are filthy with tons of oil runoff.

I went back to him near the end and asked him if he had actually witnessed the runoff before. He said, no, but he had seen pictures and videos before and there was a company he couldn't recall the name of that filters that with a big filter.

I asked him what he thinks the runoff consists of. He said "probably mostly oil".
So I said here, I have a video for you to look at. And I showed him this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLEA2dx6PV0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

He said "see, look at all that black oil".

I said "where?"

He said, "all that black oil coming off the machine."

So I rewound the video and asked him to take a closer look. This demo was done at the entrance, you can see the arrows. This was on a rarely used garage only a few years old. There were zero oil spots there. All that black nastiness was nothing more than harmless tire rubber.

He said "that changes the perspective a little bit".

See, anybody can use camera trickery to promote whatever agenda they want. Integrity is what keeps that in check. There have been many times we did demos on coils we thought were dirty only to find out they were really actually pretty clean on the inside. In those cases all we can do us report to the customer that their coils are OK and shoot for the work the next year.

We had a guy working for us before who suggested we throw a hand full of dirt in the coils and reshoot the video because wet dirt looks pretty nasty coming off a coil and would help make the sale. I have joked about this in my classes, but the truth is, that guy had to go. He couldn't be trusted.

There is no doubt there is some oil present in garage runoff, but to claim that the majority of the black runoff is oil is trickery of the worst sort.

We are not going to let this type of thing slide anymore.



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