Propane tank gauge

[Iowa Dave]

I’d suggest asking your local fire Marshall what he or she thinks about using a 500 Gallon propane tank 50 feet from your house as a nurse tank for your 5 gallon trailer tank so you could save a few bucks a year. I doubt he or she will be real enthused. In my home town a hot air balloon owner was doing this regularly, something went wrong and he burned down about half of his house and his garage. I worked with the fire department all the time. I asked them about their thoughts on this accident. Here’s their quote “€#+%*{^¥£|*# Idiot”
Just cause you can don’t mean you should.
Iowa Dave

[brroberts]

The propane company installs the wet legs and shows customers how to use them. I’m not sure where the county fire marshall is. My insurance company knows what they insure and hasn’t commented. I do agree you have to be careful.

[Centex]

skip now if not interested in an off-topic aside about a "non-combustion" use of propane ...

Many years ago I worked on an EPA Superfund "Innovative Technology" project where propane was used as a solvent, never combusted, just taking advantage of it's convenient liquid-to-gaseous phase-change properties. The setting was a long-abandoned industrial facility where pine timber had been treated with creosote to produce utility poles, railroad ties, etc. As was the standard but ill-informed practice long ago, the waste creosote was abandoned in ponds which were eventually filled with soil and then served as an ongoing source of groundwater contamination, polluting drinking water sources.

In short, soil contaminated with creosote was placed in a pressure vessel, liquid-phase propane introduced, the resultant slurry agitated with mixing paddles, then the mixture allowed to 'settle'. The creosote went into suspension in the LP which was decanted off leaving 'clean' soil to return to the excavations from whence it came. The decanted LP+creosote was passed to a 'cracking column' where the gaseous-phase propane was removed for recompression to liquid phase and re-use; the almost pure creosote collected for disposal. There's of course much more to it all than that, but that's the thumbnail sketch.

The process worked in theory, it had been bench-tested and applied successfully at a small scale at a chemical plant for separating contaminants from a predictable waste stream. This was the first try at using it at large scale (goal was 20 tons-per-hour soil throughput) with a mixed-soil matrix. The innovative technology program was intended for such tests, sometimes yielding beneficial new technology applications, sometimes not; it's how progress is made in the challenging field of hazardous waste remediation.

The required throughput was never achieved, the LP+creosote decant retained too much of the fine-grained and very abrasive clay soil particles which played havoc with piping and compressors in the process (literally eroding critical metal components away). Various process changes, more robust critical component alloys, and flocculating agents to improve soil separation were tried to solve that problem but it was eventually abandoned as a noble but failed experiment.

Useful lessons learned, albeit the cost of 'tuition' was not insignificant, it's my understanding that the concept found a few applications for separating contaminants from industrial process waste-steams that are more amenable than the complex mixed-soil matrices typical of Superfund / hazardous waste sites.

The site was finally 'cleaned' and continuing groundwater contamination halted by hauling the thousands of cubic-yards of creosote-laden soil to a 'permitted landfill' where it was placed in 'properly contained' waste management cells where it will reside and be monitored 'in perpetuity'. New clean fill was brought to the site to restore the land contours.

It was a very personally stressful project (the really fun and challenging ones often are in the field of hazardous waste remediation management) but educational and interesting nonetheless. Thought some here might find it interesting, too.

Back to topic ....

[Tom&Joan]

Originally Posted by John in Santa Cruz

Costco shows at least 4 stores in Tennessee, 2 in/near Nashville, one in Knoxville, and one near Chattanooga.

also, one in Huntsville, AL, 3 in the north side of greater Atlanta, GA, 8 or 9 in NC, 7 in SC, 9 in VA, etc etc. They tend to be pretty far on the outskirts of town, in wide open spaces where they can have huge parking lots and a massive warehouse sized building.

I guess I need to get out more! We go to Knoxville once in a while (100 miles west).
Also travel the length of Virginia on our way north once or twice a year Thanks John!

[Iowa Dave]

Hi Alan
I found your info on the process pretty interesting. I was assigned to work with the state on remediation of soil contamination, installation of monitoring wells etc on about ten underground storage tanks (gasoline and diesel). That was a stressful process too. We eventually got all of the sites done, set up monitoring and reporting through our wastewater
plant chemists and installed above ground storage at the park shops. A site was established to
Superheat the contaminated soil to rid it of contaminants. That soil was then made available to us. It was black, did no have any odor and was a nice granular product. What could go wrong? We built a berm at the zoo using this soil, compacted it and put in a nice sidewalk down to our North American waterfowl exhibit. Then we planted the berm with grass seed. Which sprouted but did not grow. And died. The superheating had killed all microbial action in the soil and left it sterile. We tilled in some amendments and got nice stand of grass. (After a couple years). We also had a softball complex built over 20 feet of garbage. That’s another story. Methane will burn.
Iowa Dave

[Centex]

Hi, Dave, thanks for sharing your interesting remediation learning experience.

Another of my Superfund projects involved incineration of soil contaminated with a wide mix of chemical-plant process wastes - volatiles, semi-volatiles, lots of long-chain hydrocarbons, and very low-concentration trace metals. That one was very successful, throughput of 40 tons/hr, the 24/7/365 process ran for about 3 years to remediate the very large site (ahead of schedule and under budget!).

The (anticipated sterile) cleaned soil was amended before backfill, it grew native grass revegetation like a fiend and the reintroduced biologics helped with residual groundwater treatment!

We ran a 1 million gallons/day groundwater extraction and treatment system concurrent with the soil excavation and treatment activates (necessary to de-water the ~30ft deep excavations, the shallow water table being only ~2ft below ground surface), that took care of the groundwater problem (as evidenced by 10 years of follow-up monitoring).

EPA and the State of Texas funded that cleanup (via respective 'Superfunds' amassed from chemical industry fees) to the tune of ~$140MM. Within a few years of completion of soil treatment the USDOJ and the TX Attorney General's Office negotiated a ~$120MM settlement with the major chemical companies that were the "responsible parties" (without litigation!). Not a bad outcome in the world of big abandoned hazardous waste sites as perhaps you can appreciate. It was a challenging, fascinating, and rewarding career (always learning with very few dull moments, that's for sure!).

The incinerator was fired by natural gas, not propane, so once again ... back to topic ...

[HABBERDABBER]

I lived above an old , defunct bank building in Virgil IL for a short spell back in the early 70's. A daughter of the family living below, Ina, slept in the vault, which was her bedroom. The water coming out of the tap there was like 12 octane; won't burn, but smelled and tasted like gas. I learned that the neighbor next door, with his tractor repair shop, had placed a gasoline tank in the ground, back filled it in and filled the tank with gas. Next day, nothing in his gasoline tank. Something went wrong.


I moved next door to be above the tractor repair shop, and he had a deeper well. Sweet, branch water from then on.


Those chemical plumes can move and persist.