Life was simpler
- Thread starter Ericict
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Try it and you'll be moving in a few years.I found a old well like that using a excavator building a White Castle, the lot used to be a old service station.It had a brick lined well full of gravel and oil, as soon as I cracked the well with a excavator it was over.
It wasn't like milky oil, the way it spread through water underground and filtered through the dirt, it ended up being the only place I've ever seen with mud that can't stick to boots.The superintendent ended up needing to have all the soil removed like 15' deep, then they had to build a gravel bed and replace all the soil on the entire lot.
It wasn't like milky oil, the way it spread through water underground and filtered through the dirt, it ended up being the only place I've ever seen with mud that can't stick to boots.The superintendent ended up needing to have all the soil removed like 15' deep, then they had to build a gravel bed and replace all the soil on the entire lot.
Hey, you were also encouraged to smoke while pregnant back then, and use leaded fuel
and riding in the back of a pick up was one of life's simple pleasures
As a kid, one of my chores was to take the used motor oil, put in a weed sprayer, and spray the gravel road from the paved road to our house, about 1/4 mile to keep the dust down.
Wish I had a copy of the Mechanix Illustrated article on the virtues of asbestos for Mens Suits.
Hey, you were also encouraged to smoke while pregnant back then, and use leaded fuel
One of my first jobs was at a family owned truck company. they had about a dozen tri axle dump trucks and were based out of their house. The first day I worked there I was told, "If you have to take a piss, go do it in that tire laying behind the garage". The next day after the first oil change they said, "Take this oil behind the garage and dump it in that tire laying there." Then I was called a wimp because I wasn't strong enough to carry the bottom half of a barrel filled with 10 or so gallons.
When I started changing oil at a shop in highschool I was an apprentice for this older Haitian gentlemen named Joe. This dude was an old-school mechanic that tuned by ear and smell and didn't want a damn thing to do with a scan tool (this was pre-OBDII). He would regularly, and I mean half a dozen times a day, wash his hands with transmission fluid and then spray them off with brake cleaner. I don't know how long he lived, but it couldn't have been long.
Back in high school (late '60s) and idiot "friend" drained his oil on the side of a road over a storm sewer grate. Everything was going fine until the drain plug slipped through his fingers.
Yup. That, and to kill the blackberry bushes...
Now, I use Crossbow. It works well. I hate blackberry bushes.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D0JHB5K/?tag=wranglerorg-20
In the 60's my fathers business developed film for the military...I mean 42" wide rolls by hundreds of feet long. The main by product of film developing is silver, back then no one cared about recovering the silver (or had the technology) so they created leaching fields behind the shop. The acre behind the shop became so black with the silver that it would no longer drain. 40 years later he was contacted by the "super fund" clean up company and said if there were any houses within 2 miles of the back that they would all be dead. It was totally legal back then, I can only think of the thousands of $$ in silver that were dumped.
My guess is that the silver recovery wasn't profitable at the time especially with the daily dilute quantities. The recovery process is relatively simple chemistry and was certainly possible in the 1960's and earlier. I wonder if over time, that backyard would become concentrated enough to be worth mining during the "cleanup".
Kiwi TJ
Just asked myself if I’m crazy and we all said No
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I worked for a photocopying company when I was 16 back in the UK . On the bigger copy machines that was used to copy engineering/architects drawings my job was to empty the ammonia once a week about 1.5 gallons ….no gloves , no mask (I was told to just hold my breath ) and into the drain !!!.
If oil didn't belong in the ground God wouldn't have put it there to begin with.
I've read that prior to our large scale oil drilling over the last 100 years or so, there were many more natural oil seeps around the world similar to the Le Brea tar pits. Far back throughout history, people would harvest the natural tar and oil for many uses. That isn't a defense of dumping our used engine oil. I assume the refined stuff is a bit different than the raw stuff we pump out of the ground. Though we probably don't want crude oil in our water supply either.
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