“Hazardous materials — cannons, denatured ordnance, drums of toxic chemicals or chemical waste, missile front ends, bomb cases, rocket bodies. Weapons, primarily. The military service generating the surplus takes the high explosives out, but then we get the iron.”
They walked out of the warehouse and into the bright sunlight of the lay-down area. Carson seized the opportunity to light a cigarette. He offered one to Stafford, who shook his head.
“Thanks. Quit five years ago.” Stafford thought he saw Carson’s hands shaking. “What on earth can you do with bombs and rockets?” he asked.
“Bomb and rocket casings, remember. Not supposed to hold nigh explosives. They become monster feed.”
” ‘Monster feed’?”
Carson grinned through a cloud of blue smoke. “Show you in a bit.
Basically, we cut them up in the demil facility. Turn ‘em into shredded metal and various liquid products, and then auction off the by-products to scrap dealers. This here is the general lay-down area. Mostly just bigger stuff.”
Stafford looked, wishing he’d brought his sunglasses. There were long rows of palletized material, containing such things as industrial-size drill presses and lathes, a clutch of old refrigerators, a firefighting vehicle from a military airfield, skip boxes of scrap metal, industrial air conditioning units, several rusty-looking water heaters, and mounds of used truck tires.
“Bigger stuff,” Stafford said. He really was interested in the high-value components, but he was satisfied to let Carson to do his thing.
“That’s right. This is more of the general auction inventory. That’s warehouse two over there; number one’s right behind it. They contain the small, high-value items. The hundred-thousand-dollar radar amplifier tubes that happen to be obsolete, by military standards.”
“Who buys those?”
“Usually the FAA. They’re still using a lot of old, tube driven radars.”
“That’s a comforting thought.”
Carson nodded as they walked across the lay-down area. Stafford realized they were crossing tarmac and wondered if this area had been part of the abandoned airfield. There were forklifts chugging around the area, moving pallets in and out of the warehouses, which were arranged in two lines on either side. He asked Carson about it.
“This area used to be the main hangar and maintenance facility for an Army helicopter base. It was shut down a long time ago, before I got here. They knocked down most of the actual hangars except for one. That contains the demil facility. That one, over there.”
They changed course slightly to avoid a backing forklift and headed toward the ex-hangar building. One warehouse in the line backed right up to the hangar building. Stafford could hear a loud tearing noise from inside. Carson stopped about fifty feet from the doorway.
“Normally, we run demil in the evening, but there’s a backlog. Demil is a hazardous industrial area. We’ll pick up hearing protection, hard hats, and safety glasses in the vestibule inside that doorway. Then we’ll sign in.”
“What’s the noise?” Stafford asked. v “The Monster,” Carson said.
“Basically, it’s a really big shredding machine. The process starts with seven diamond-tipped saw blades, followed by a bank of chipping hammers, then a grinder. Turns anything that goes in there into fragments.
“Monster feed,’ the guys call it. Then there’s a bank of electromagnets to separate ferrous material from nonferrous, an acid bath to dissolve electronics insulation, a centrifuge for separating the liquid products, and some further screen separators. At the very end are collection modules for the resulting scrap, and those streams are led to compactors. This is the place where those rocket and bomb casings come, as well as any classified design stuff, like military radar klystrons, antenna arrays, things like that.”
“Take a big crew to run it?”
“Nope. Takes three, four guys to set up the run — that whole warehouse back there houses the feed-assembly system. But once the belt starts, it takes one guy to sit in the control room and basically watch. The machine chews up anything — metal, wood, plastic, organic substances.
Liquids are separated, filtered, centrifuged, broken down with acids, centrifuged again to separate water from organic liquids, and then pumped to the toxic-waste tanks for settling and further processing.
Anything solid and nonmetallic is consumed in the acid wash, and anything that survived that is compressed into blocks of scrap metal for, sale to the metal merchants, who in turn sell the blocks as feedstock for steel or aluminum reprocessing. When the run’s done, another crew empties the compaction modules, usually the next morning.
Let’s go on in.”
Carson pushed a call button by the door, which clicked, allowing them into a vestibule area. Even in the vestibule, the noise level was very high, and Stafford reached gratefully for the ear” protectors. They signed the access log, although Stafford noticed that there was no one in the vestibule to supervise access. He assumed the operator’s control of the door took care of that.
Carson led the way through the next set of doors and into a large industrial bay where a huge locomotive-sized steel machine hunkered down on the concrete floor. The top of the machine reached almost all the way to the ceiling girders of the hangar, some sixty feet up. The bulk of it measured about eighty feet long and twenty wide. A I five-foot-wide conveyor belt emerged from safety-caged double doors on the left side of the bay. It was traveling at about waist height, carrying plastic boxes filled with all sorts of military equipment. The belt approached the’ maw of the machine from left to right, then folded under itself and returned back into the feed-assembly warehouse. There was a glass-enclosed control booth to one side of the room, where an ear-muffed operator was visible at a console.
Carson led Stafford over toward the opening of the de mil machine. There were safety screens and yellow hazard markings on the floor all along the route of the conveyor belt. The business end of the machine was impressive. Several wicked-looking band-saw blades came down vertically across the five-foot square of the machine’s mouth. The blades appeared to be about ten inches wide, spaced about an inch apart, and bathed in silky sheets of cooling oil. Anything hitting the blades was immediately engaged and cut into segments in a fiery shower of sparks and smoke from the rending metal. The process produced a hideous tearing sound. A large hood above the entry gobbled up all the smoke and metal vapors. The other components of the maceration process were apparently contained out of sight within the machine. Behind and below was a complex nest of large pipes coiled under and around its foundations, leading to large boxlike components marked MAGNETIC SEPARATION, AIR FILTRATION, PARTICULATE SCRUBBER, and NEUTRALIZING SCRUBBER. Three enclosed conveyor systems led into the next building, where, Stafford assumed, the resulting rubble was compacted or contained for movement to the auction warehouses.
It was clearly impossible to hold a conversation in the presence of such noise, so Stafford indicated he’d seen enough and they went back out into the vestibule. Three men were there looking at clipboards and discussing the current run. This time the workers nodded at Carson, but their greetings appeared to be entirely official. Stafford noticed that Carson returned their greetings in similar fashion. No love lost between the DRMO boss and his employees here, he thought, confirming his earlier impression. They went back outside to the relative quiettof the tarmac.
For some reason, Carson looked relieved to be out of the building. He lit up another cigarette. Stafford confirmed that Carson’s hands were definitely shaking.
“You can see why they call it ‘the Monster,’ ” Carson said. “It cost eleven million dollars, but it does the job. You get a compacted mixture of very clean metallic dust and bits out the back end, and a variety of fluids. That building over there is devoted to fluid separation, detox, and recovery. We sell the output of that, too. The employees call that “Monster piss,’ naturally. There’s a plan to put up a generating system where we’ll burn the volatile xproducts and make our own electricity.