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Visible Emissions Training For Campbells Soup
This story appeared in a Campbells Soup News Letter written by Robert Counselman
Maintaining a smoke-free facility sometimes has some strange regulations dictated by the EPA that we must follow. As Title V holders (which is our EPA Permit for Smoke Stacks), one of the rules is that we must keep certified people on staff trained to read visible emissions. Visible emissions or smoke is rated by how much light will pass through the emissions and is called Opacity. Students must pass a stringent test reading 25 different random black smokes and 25 random white smokes and get them all within about a 10% average of accuracy. It is very difficult and if the student misses just one reading out of the whole fifty, by just 20%, then they have flunked the whole test, and must start over. To make matters even worse, the certification is only valid for six months, so we hold what we call in slang, “Smoke School” every spring and every fall. We located an excellent firm from Louisiana by the name of Whitlow Enterprises, and they set up here on-site for us on County Road 12 by the truck gate twice a year. Boiler house Operating Engineers check the stacks to make sure they are clear when coming in on shift change; but the certification is also needed if the mechanical Opacity monitor should fail and we need these people to read the stacks manually. Not only do these smoke reading students have to get their eyes tuned perfectly to these smoke standards, but they must know how to fill out a very complex worksheet for the EPA, reading the smoke stack by a stop watch every 15 seconds for 6 minutes straight. The process and the EPA rules must be followed to the letter, not leaving any line blank on the form. So if you ever drive by truck gate one and you see a bunch of people sitting and looking at what looks like an oversized barbeque grill, you will know what is going on and be able to explain what it is now.
