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Look, it’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s not Superman...but a helicopter carrying a septic tank?
With its strong wind gusts and frigid temperatures, Mount Washington has some of the planet’s most severe weather. For instance, Mount Washington holds the record for the highest wind gust directly measured at the Earth’s surface: 231 mph recorded on April 12, 1934. Its record low temperature was –47°F, recorded on Jan. 29, 1934.
Due to these conditions and the natural terrain of the area, the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire has to go to great lengths to meet adequate wastewater and water treatment demands for the eight huts in the area. Founded in 1876, the Appalachian Mountain Club is America’s oldest nonprofit conservation and recreation organization. The club promotes the protection, enjoyment, and wise use of the mountains, rivers, and trails of the Appalachian region.
The New Hampshire chapter has seven huts in the White Mountain National Forrest and one cabin in the Franconia State Notch State Park. All of these huts have full-service kitchens and vary in size from housing 36 to 90 occupants.
For the past 24 years, Dennis McIntosh has served as the construction supervisor for Appalachian Mountain club. “The weather is relatively nasty,” McIntosh says “Being that it is just 1,200 feet lower than the summit, probably the average daily temperatures in the summer are in the 50s. It freezes during the summer, too. We have to drill wells for drinking water and the groundwater that we take out of the wells for drinking in the middle of the summer is about 35 degrees.”
Trials and Tribulations
Over his years of tenure, McIntosh has certainly dealt with the trials and tribulations of providing water and wastewater treatment for the Appalachian Mountain Club huts in the area. Due to the rocky terrain, almost everything they use must be flown in via helicopter therefore it must also be lightweight. “We’ve been flying things in since the mid-1970s. Before that almost everything was packed in by donkeys or on people’s backs,” he says.
All of the huts have New Hampshire-approved wastewater systems, which consist of grease traps, composting toilets, septic tanks, and leachfields. “They all have the same basic components that the state tells us we have to have, but they are all laid out in different ways depending on what the site has to offer.” McIntosh says. “We’ve tried about everything. Some of these huts have been operating since late 1800s. So it’s gone from pit toilets to—in the ’70s and ’80s—flush toilets. But it was a tremendous amount of water to pump and get rid of into the ground. So that was the main impetus to get rid of the flush toilets and going with composting toilets to reduce water use.”
Airborne Solutions
A coring drill was flown in three pieces in the mid-1990s to drill wells for all of the huts for a water supply. In the wintertime, only three huts are operating, and the water supply is shut down. These three huts are near a lake or river so water is brought in by the buckets and boiled for use.
Since there is little dirt in the area, the septic tanks at the huts are exposed to many of the elements. “There’s very little overburden,” McIntosh says. “So what we do is try and make a honeycomb of rocks and rubble around the tanks. We try and keep them out of the sun at least, but it’s not like we can dig a hole, drop it in, and bury it 6 feet under.”
Pumping the tanks can also be a challenge. McIntosh says that they have to pump the tanks out with manual hand pumps and fly the drums of waste out by helicopter. Or if they need to empty the whole tank, a gas pump is flown up ahead of time to do the job.
“Yearly, every spring when they thaw out, which sometimes isn’t until the middle of June, we’ll skim whatever is on top of the grease traps and bale out the bottom and maybe just do one or two 55-gallon drums to stay on top of it.” McIntosh says.
And providing an adequate leachfield in the area also poses problems. If there is not enough native material, such as gravel, dirt and sand, then material has to be flown in as well.
“Many of our leachfields we have switched to anthracite coal because it is lighter than sand. Pound per pound, it has more filtration than sand,” McIntosh says.
Getting septic tanks to the hut sites has also been a problem. In the past the Appalachian Mountain Club has tried pouring concrete and forming a tank and flying in sheets of steel and welding a tank in the area. All of which have been relatively short-lived.
Recently the club had a Fralo septic tank flown in to serve as a grease trap for the Lakes of the Clouds Hut. Made of seamless polyethylene the tank was lightweight enough to be delivered by helicopter. Fralo Plastech Manufacturing is the owner and operator of the world’s largest multilayer blow-molding machine designed specifically for the manufacture of underground septic and water tanks.
Previously the hut had a 2,500-gallon, aboveground, polyethylene water tank, which had served as its grease trap since 1992. “I’m interested to see how this [new] tank holds up,” McIntosh says. “The thing that we typically see with most of our plastic tanks is that because we don’t bury them they tend to get a little bit misshapen because they don’t have pressure on them evenly.”
Nikki Stiles is a freelance writer based in the city of Fairmont, WV.
OW - November/December 2006 |
