Disposition of Remains

 The lab director and I often talk about lab activities that would make good PR photos and short articles in the Department of Agriculture and State Veterinarian newsletters. The Pathology section of the lab almost never makes the cut (heh, unintentional pun there). There is no way to make a necropsy visually palatable for public consumption. There is no way to make slicing up hunks of formalin-fixed cow liver into thin sections to make microscope slides fun. And there is a very important component of our section that we can't ever discuss--the incinerator.

I didn't anticipate becoming an expert on incineration as a part of this job, but so it has come to pass. While the monthly totals vary wildly, our small lab incinerates about 25 tons of animal remains a year. Somebody has to be in charge of that, and that somebody is me.

The lab building was constructed around 1973 or 1974, and there is an incinerator built into the necropsy floor. I've been told tales of former pathologists who would perform necropsies on cows and other large animals hauled up on the hoist directly over the old incinerator. Fortunately, that generation isn't in charge anymore, because while it may be efficient, that sort of thing is fucking appallingly sloppy. By the time I arrived at the lab, the old incinerator was being decommissioned and the new one starting up.

The new incinerator is a stand-alone unit attached to a very large propane tank, located in a fenced lot across the street from the lab. It took almost six months of nearly weekly crises to get that damned thing up and running. I made significant contributions to that success, and consider it a professional achievement that I mention on my resume. 

If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that I mentioned the incinerator is across the street from the lab. So how exactly do we get those 25 tons of animal remains over there? It involves very large woven plastic sacks designed to hold many hundreds of pounds, large containers, a truck, and a forklift. It required a lot of planning and training to work out the details. We had to consider optics (can't be hauling bloody bits and leaking bags across the street) and safety while still designing a process that would work.

I know how many pounds we incinerate per time unit, how many gallons of propane we use per hour, the cost, in propane, per pound of material incinerated. Based on observations of burn efficiency, I developed a simple formula to calculate the number of hours we need to run the incinerator per 100 lbs of load. I analyze temperature logs of every incineration event. I have the cell phone number of the propane delivery driver. I arranged forklift operation and safety certification for 10 lab personnel, including myself. I have been on top of the incinerator messing around with one of the thermocouples a dozen different times. I wrote instructions on how to trouble-shoot the controller on wet days. I have chipped ice out of the tracks that the lid travels on to get the incinerator open. I have spent hours out there in all weather with various repair and maintenance guys learning how the burners work. I made worksheets for the technicians to collect the information that I need to fill out official logs related to our operating permit, and when those worksheets proved to be a bit too complicated, revised them and revised them again until everyone can use them correctly.

I expend mental and physical energy on the incinerator nearly every week. The skills I've gained seem fairly esoteric, but they are actually part of the general problem-solving aspects of my job. Incineration of animal remains is an important contribution made by the lab to general public health, but we'll never be able to "showcase" it.