Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 17, 1993 TAG: 9312170042
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ed shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This party you've got to imagine is so big and so wild that the pickling liquor is brought in by the tanker-truckload. This, friends, is a party.
Who could underwrite such a heathen night of pickle liquor partying?
Roanoke. Your city tax dollars, hard at work, bringing pickling liquor to the pickling liquor-less masses.
Every day, or every other day, a tank truck pulls into Roanoke bearing libation - thousands of gallons of the liquor, shipped at city expense, entirely for city use.
Having long ago felt my burning desire to party diminish to a flicker, then cool to an ember and finally collapse in a cold scatter of ash, I must admit that I don't practice the art as often as I might. A city-sponsored pickling liquor bash might be just the jolt I need to rekindle my interest.
In pursuit of the ultimate tax-supported buzz, I followed the pungent, sweet-sour aroma of pickling liquor to Roanoke's Water Pollution Control Plant. This used to be the sewage treatment plant. I don't know when the name changed.
Steven Walker manages the plant in Southeast Roanoke. On his desk is a plastic vial of pickling liquor. It looks like Prell shampoo; it smells like hell.
Might I sample just a snootful? One hit of pickling liquor for auld lang syne, a hair of the dog that bit me and all that?
Walker stares across his desk. He doesn't even like the idea of having the cap screwed off the pickling liquor, let alone the idea of someone taking a hit of the party juice.
He suggests it might kill me.
My God, even Steven Walker sitting here in the office at the sewage plant, musky sludge scent hanging outside the door, knows that I'm not much of a partier anymore. Has word of my demise spread that far? Is my reputation that lame?
Walker watches nervously as I caress the liquor tube.
The stuff comes from a steel mill near Pittsburgh, he says, hoping I won't spill it.
It's kept in a vat in the steel mill. Newly forged steel is dipped into the vat - it starts as hydrochloric acid - to clean the metal. You know the old saying: You can only dip your steel into the acid so many times before something bad happens.
Sure enough, the acid doesn't last forever. It becomes, says Walker, ferric chloride, riddled with bobbing iron molecules. To the steel mill folks, it's a nasty and dangerous waste product - called pickling liquor - that they're glad to give away.
To sewage treaters, it's liquid gold. Blended into waste water, the iron molecules latch onto phosphorous molecules in the sewage and drag them to the bottom of the tank in a wrasslin' match straight off the periodic table of the elements. Our treatment plant uses about 2,500 gallons of pickling liquor every day.
Left uncaptured by the iron, phosphorous would gush into the Roanoke River to promote such hysterical plant growth that algae would ooze from the river banks to devour small pets and children.
And that, friends, would be no party.
by CNB