A day I will never forget …
Adam Jochelson, P. E., MOLO
My words caught in my throat … tears welled up in my eyes and spilled over … for nearly a full minute, I could not speak. My colleagues looked on in sympathetic silence. I could see the heartbreak in their eyes. It had only been two days since we’d lost Hot Rod.
The middle two quarters of 2010 were pretty tough times at McCommas Bluff. They were easily the worst six months of my tenure there in terms of extreme events. The period was bookended by the two fires I described last time as the second worst thing that can happen at a landfill. If you gave it some thought last month, you may have figured out the worst thing that can happen—a fatality.
A Natural Part of Life at a Landfill
Death is not foreign to disposal facilities. Most landfills that dispose of municipal solid waste (MSW) from residential and commercial sources also accept animal carcasses. These come from various sources including roadkill cleanup operations, animal shelters and veterinary clinics. In Texas, dead animals fall under a classification called “special waste,” meaning it must be handled a little differently than other waste streams. In specifically calling out this category, state law recognizes that landfills must be prepared to handle an appreciable quantity. At McCommas Bluff, special sanitation vehicles transporting dead animals arrive pretty much every day. This can be a little difficult to handle at first, especially for animal lovers like me. However, gruesome as it may sound, after a while you do get used to it.
An unfortunate reality is that if you work at a large landfill for a long enough period of time, it’s almost inevitable that you will eventually have to face human death in one way or another. However, a fatal accident is not the most likely way it will appear; other occurrences are far more common. Sometimes, police investigations regarding missing persons lead them to the landfill. You’ve probably heard about stories like that in the news. A quick Internet search for “police investigation landfill” should lead you to some recent examples. One reason that landfills record their daily working face locations is to better assist law enforcement in recovering potential evidence in these cases—GPS helps this immensely. On some occasions, landfill staff must notify the police upon discovery of a deceased person no one knew was missing. This happened once in my time at the City of Dallas. An operator noticed what appeared to be a human arm sticking out of the garbage at the working face. We immediately shut down that area and notified the authorities. Their investigation concluded that the man died as a result of blunt trauma to the back of the head. The detectives suspected foul play, but actionable evidence was so scant that catching the culprit seemed unlikely. In fact, from what I understand the police weren’t even able to determine the man’s identity.
I didn’t know Roderick Terrell, “Hot Rod” to his friends, any better than the unidentified crime victim above—I’d never met him. He drove a brush collection vehicle for the City, so he spent brief moments at McCommas unloading his truck, and our paths had never crossed. Only a few landfill employees knew him personally. But his death hit us all really hard, and produced a lot of tears in men you’d never expect to have cried over someone they’d never met. In the five years since his death, I’ve spent a fair amount of time contemplating why it affected us all so dramatically.
Your Work Family
I’ve heard many people talk about their “work husbands” and “work wives.”1 I’m currently in the middle of a long stretch as a work bachelor, but that doesn’t mean I’m lonely at work. One benefit of being part of a large organization like the City of Dallas’s Sanitation Department is that you can have a “work crazy uncle” or “work distant cousins.” Though many of us probably only were ever in the same place at the occasional “work family reunion,” Hot Rod was part our work family. As such, we all mourned his loss a little more poignantly than we would have a random stranger’s.
But a more powerful driver of our emotional response came from the nature of the waste management business itself. Simply put, sanitation is dangerous work, a fact that goes largely unnoticed. Ask anyone to name dangerous jobs, and you’ll likely hear about firefighters and police officers. This makes sense; their jobs specifically involve protecting us from danger. In doing so, they naturally must put themselves in precarious environments. Ask for a non-uniformed profession, and if they watch enough television, they’ll likely say deep sea fisherman or something similar. (By the way, logging is typically the most dangerous of all.) All of these are among the most dangerous occupations, fully deserving of the recognition they get. But less well-known is that collecting and processing waste consistently ranks as one of the top ten most dangerous professions—fifth worst in 2014.2
Regular safety training is an integral part of every waste management program across the country. It ensures that we all remain aware of the dangers that we and our colleagues encounter each day. Plus, strict safety standards in the field help keep us safe. However, as with any activity we practice repeatedly, over time we become accustomed to our environments. Eventually, our actions become almost unconscious and we complete our work much like automatons. This dulls our vigilance, makes us complacent, lackadaisical. We leave our hardhats sitting on the seat beside us when we exit our vehicles. We put a jacket over our reflective vests on a cold day. We forget stay close to our vehicles when preparing to dump.
Serious Injury or Death Can Occur
No one saw what happened to Roderick. He had some history of medical conditions that could have caused him to lose consciousness while preparing to empty to his truck. Maybe he wandered a bit beyond the established safe distance from the vehicle. A mild panic set in when his unattended brush collection vehicle was found idling at the working face about an hour after he had crossed the scales. We hoped maybe he had been called away by some urgent emergency, but we feared the worst. We diverted landfill customers to a backup working face elsewhere on-site. A combined search team of Dallas sanitation, police, and fire employees took until the next morning to find him. Nothing could have prepared me for what I felt at that moment.
Thinking about death is difficult for many of us. Talking about it is even worse. In the waste industry we must overcome this aversion, and remind ourselves that cutting corners or failing to observe safety procedures can, in fact, end in fatality. Facing that reality in the spring of 2010 was the toughest emotional day of my time at McCommas. During the majority of my tenure there, I moderated weekly planning meetings attended regularly by operational stakeholders, including the landfill manager, supervisors, environmental monitors, our gas collection contractor—usually about 10 of us. Each Tuesday morning we discussed landfill status, plans for the week, challenges, and action items.
The events of the week had pushed our normal meeting time back to Wednesday, and a sense of dread overcame me as we started. Honestly, everyone was a little tense—we all knew what was coming. As I began discussing the previous days’ heart-rending catastrophe, glancing around at my work family, I began to wonder, “Why Roderick?” That’s when the thought crept into my head: it could have been any one of us … even me. It’s not my custom to cry at work. I can’t recall another instance where I’ve done it in front of anyone. Some might consider such a break down embarrassing—a sign of weakness. But I, for one, am not ashamed of my tears that day. I shed them for Hot Rod, and I’d do it again.
Adam Jochelson, P. E., MOLO, is a Landfill Engineer and Facility Specialist working for GeoShack, Inc., where he promotes the application of cutting edge technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of landfill operations. Adam built his knowledge and techniques over a nine-year period as the on-site engineer at McCommas Bluff Landfill in Dallas, TX. His unique experiences in engineering and other fields have combined to create an exceptional understanding of the various challenges inherent in landfill planning, design, and operations. Send comments or questions to Adam at [email protected] or call him at (972) 342-3055.
Notes
- According to CNN, some indicators that you may have a work spouse include, “You depend on a particular co-worker for office supplies, snacks and aspirin,” and “At breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks, your closest co-worker knows what to order for you and how you like your coffee (and vice versa).” [http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/11/10/cb.seven.signs.work.spouse/index.html?eref=rss_us].
- “These Are the 10 Most Dangerous Jobs in America,” 4 December 2014, http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2014/12/04/most-dangerous-jobs-in-america/.
Sidebar
Land·fill En·gi·neer [land-fil en-juh-neer]
noun an environmental engineer who specializes in the design, management, planning, and development, of solid waste management facilities; a unique combination of engineer, surveyor, data analyst, computer programmer, construction worker, manager, teacher, writer, conservationist, and experimenter.