Blogging on Consecutive Days

Posting 2 days in row has never been done before....... at least not by me. However, the other AgroLiquid blogger has achieved the great feat of back to back posts many times. Speaking of which did everyone know it's Dr. Jerry's Birthday. Now I couldn't tell if he's one of these people who despises growing old (I mean not getting younger) or embraces it. But for how ever old he is, I think he's still getting around pretty good. I see he's making a trip to the Dakota's next week and it's perfect timing because in celebration of Jerry's birthday President Obama just signed an executive order to place him among some of our nations finest. Happy Birthday Jerry!!

 

Oh, and there are some other things worth reporting on as well. 

In Stockton, the rail spur extension is well under way. We added 365' of rail which will give us an additonal 6 or 7 cars depending on who places them.

Here is the same rail extension from the opposite end. Looks about like 365' doesn't it? The contractor had to stop short of the connection point to construct some re-inforcement where the tracks travel across the tunnel.

Like all concrete construction in California they've designed this rail bridging system to survive nuclear warfare and an earthquake measuring north of 8 on the Richter Scale.

This is what a well looks like California. This is our new 8" well drilled 400' deep designed to deliver 400 gpm. The biggest difference between the design in California and other places that battle the cold is the pressure tank is exposed to the elements. Something else that was new to me was the reserve tank (larger galvanized tank). The philosphy out there is that it reduces the need for imediate power demand. Like a lot of the other regulations and methods on that edge of the country......I'll go with that.

Sub-Zero Construction in Williams, IA

The cold weather hasn't effected the installation of the new tank farm plumbing in Williams. Well maybe a little. Frequent warming breaks to thaw out digits and prevent frost bite from setting in has slowed them down a bit but they continue to work away. In fact, there have only been a handful of days they haven't work through this never ending cold spell.

In this photo, you can see the 6" truck fill header piped to the double pump system. The double pump configuration will allow us to load a truck and a rail car with the same product at the same time without sacrificing flow rates. We've calculated it to load rail at 700 gpm and trucks at 500gpm. The 6" plumbing on the discharge side of the pump will connect to the valve matrix you see in the photo below.

All of the products in the containment will run through this contraption to get to one of 5 loading destinations; south rail, north rail, truck bay 1, truck bay 2, or mixer. The engineers have coined it the "valve matrix" which sounds pretty cool so I'll stick with it.

If it's original intended purpose doesn't work out we can always market it as the worlds most elaborate potato gun. That's not even funny........it has to work. I mean it will work.

In this photo you see the single pump system. This is set up for some of the products that don't require high loading volumes. As you can see, some of the tanks are missing. Once the plumbing is 100% complete, we'll move the remaining tanks. We have a strict completion deadline of March 1 for the new load out system. The weather isn't helping but no excuses will be acceptable when we're looking at shipping record numbers in April.