Tom's water problem

Tom turned up at Bill’s place towing the old tandem trailer.

Dog came out from under the veranda, walked around it once and stopped at the tailgate. There was a drip. Dog watched it hit the dirt, then another, then stepped sideways.

“What’ve you got?” Bill asked.

“Manure. Dawson cleaned the yards out after that rain.”

Bill looked into the trailer. It was full of dark cattle-yard muck, wet enough to have settled flat across the top and with just enough straw mixed through it to suggest someone had once tried to improve matters.

“Bit wet.”

“Perfect for the orchard,” Tom said. “One tonne exactly.”

“You weighed it?”

“Dawson did. Loader scales.”

Bill nodded towards the tailgate. A thin brown line was working its way along the bottom seal and dropping steadily onto the ground.

“You’re losing some.”

“That’s only water.”

Dog looked at the growing damp patch beneath the trailer. Bill looked at Dog. Dog looked back at Bill.

“He seems interested in your only water.”

Tom crouched down. “It’ll stop once the loose stuff drains out.”

Bill considered that for a moment.

“So you loaded a tonne.”

“Yes.”

“And part of the tonne is draining onto my driveway.”

“The manure’s still in the trailer.”

“Most of it.”

Tom stood up. “You’re being unnecessarily technical.”

Dog sniffed the wet patch and decided unnecessary technicality had its advantages.

They headed down to the orchard, Tom in front with the trailer and Bill following in the ute.

That turned out to be a mistake.

For the first kilometre Bill got the occasional brown spot on the windscreen. Then Tom hit the corrugations near the cattle grid and the trailer began contributing more enthusiastically.

By the second gate Bill had the wipers going.

Dog sat in the passenger seat watching the brown arcs smear backwards and forwards across the glass. Bill tried the washers. This spread the problem more evenly.

“Good thing it’s only water,” Bill said.

Dog sneezed.

A little further on Tom went through a pothole and something substantial escaped from the tailgate. It hit the road, then the ute, then most of the lower half of the windscreen.

Bill slowed down.

Dog moved into the back seat.

By the time they reached the orchard, the front of the ute had acquired a thin brown coating from the headlights to the roofline. Bill got out and looked at it for a while.

Tom climbed down.

“Bit dusty?”

Bill ran one finger across the bonnet and held it up.

“Your manure’s following us.”

Tom looked back at the trailer.

“That’s just drainage.”

“Excellent. I was worried it might be shit.”

Dog jumped out, sniffed the front wheel and immediately moved away.

Bill looked at him.

“Quality control says wash it today.”

Before tipping, Tom backed onto the old platform scales. He climbed out, checked the number and frowned.

“Eight hundred and six kilos.”

Bill came over.

“Thought you had a tonne.”

“I did.”

“Seems you’ve misplaced some.”

“It’s water.”

“Water weighs.”

“Yes, Bill. I’m familiar with water.”

“Apparently not all of it.”

Tom checked the scale again.

“That much can’t have come out.”

Bill pointed back towards the road.

Dog was already walking along the wheel track, nose down.

“He’s got a search party organised.”

Tom decided the important thing was to get the remaining eight hundred kilos onto the orchard. He released the tailgate catches, climbed back into the ute and raised the trailer.

Nothing happened.

He raised it further.

The load moved perhaps two centimetres and stopped.

Tom lowered the tray, drove forward sharply and braked.

The manure remained where it was.

Bill leaned against the ute.

“Worked better at Dawson’s?”

“Loader dropped it straight in.”

“Was it wetter then?”

Tom looked at him.

“Yes.”

They raised the tray again. Tom climbed onto the drawbar with a shovel and started attacking the load from the front.

The top still looked much the same as it had at Dawson’s, but underneath it had settled into a dense sticky mass with a strong attachment to the trailer floor.

Tom drove the shovel in.

It went about six inches and stopped.

He put his boot on it.

It went another inch.

“This is ridiculous.”

Bill watched him for a while.

“Funny stuff, water.”

Tom grunted.

“It hasn’t changed the manure.”

“Seems to have changed your afternoon.”

Dog returned from checking the road and sat beside Bill.

His paws were muddy.

“Find the missing bit?”

Dog licked one paw.

Tom eventually freed a lump about the size of a feed bag. It slid down the raised trailer, reached the tailgate and stopped.

He hit it with the shovel.

It stayed.

“This stuff went into the trailer easily this morning.”

Bill nodded.

“Had two hundred kilos of assistance.”

“It didn’t pour.”

“Slopped?”

Tom hit the lump again.

“Loaded easily.”

“Fair enough.”

After another twenty minutes they had removed perhaps a third of the load. Tom sat on the mudguard, sweaty, muddy and beginning to take the matter personally.

“I still don’t see how losing some water makes this much difference.”

Bill picked up a handful from the pile on the ground.

“Was the water spread through it when you loaded it?”

“More or less.”

“And then some of it moved down.”

“Yes.”

“And some of that ran out.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s left isn’t quite the same stuff you loaded.”

“It’s still manure.”

Bill looked at the shovel standing upright in the load without assistance.

“Certainly committed to being manure.”

Tom stared back along the road.

“So weighing it at Dawson’s doesn’t tell me exactly what arrives here.”

“Apparently not.”

“And if the wetter bit moved towards the bottom, a sample off the top wouldn’t necessarily tell me what’s sitting against the tailgate.”

Bill shrugged.

“You’re the bloke with the tonne.”

“Eight hundred kilos.”

“Getting more accurate already.”

Dog walked to the back of the trailer, sniffed the dark wet residue around the tailgate, then walked over to the material they had managed to unload. He sniffed that too and sat between the two.

Tom watched him.

“What’s he doing?”

“Comparing the liquid fraction with the solids.”

“He’s a dog.”

“He noticed there were two fractions before we did.”

Tom looked at the stained road, Bill’s filthy ute and the load still stuck in the trailer.

“Right. Next time I’ll use a proper sealed trailer.”

Bill nodded.

“That’ll stop you losing it on the road.”

“Exactly.”

They both looked at the trailer.

Tom frowned.

“But the water will still move.”

“Probably.”

“And if it can’t leak out…”

“It’ll stay in there.”

Tom looked towards the low end of the raised trailer.

“So when I open the tailgate, I could have all that liquid sitting there waiting for me.”

Bill nodded.

“Full tonne too.”

Tom thought about this.

“So I’ll need somewhere for the water to go.”

“And some way of knowing what’s in it.”

“And if I want the manure back the way it was when I loaded it, I’d have to mix it back through.”

Bill handed him the shovel.

“Sounds like you’ve got next Saturday sorted.”

Dog got up, walked around to the side of the trailer and lay down well clear of the tailgate.

Tom looked at him.

“What’s he doing now?”

Bill picked up the hose and started washing the ute.

“Planning for the sealed trailer.”

Tom stared at Dog.

Dog closed his eyes.

Bill turned the hose towards the windscreen.

“See, Tom, stopping the leak doesn’t make the water disappear.”

He looked at the trailer.

“It just lets you choose where you find it.”

Where does the water go?

The proposed Glan Devon facility will receive biosolids trucked roughly 150 km from wastewater treatment plants. Those biosolids are expected to be around 18% solids, which means they are about 82% water by mass. That raises a surprisingly basic question: what happens to that water during transport and when the truck arrives at Glan Devon?

This is not a hypothetical issue invented for this development. Queensland's own Biosolids End of Waste Code requires biosolids to be transported in a vehicle that is fit for purpose and prevents release of the material into the environment during transport. The Code does not prescribe a particular truck design, but that requirement clearly includes containing whatever solid or liquid material may be released from the biosolids during transport.

There is also practical Queensland experience behind that requirement. Evidence concerning a biosolids contractor operating across Queensland and NSW described biosolids from different treatment plants as varying “from dry and cake like to quite sloppy”. The contractor's procedures required seals on truck tailgates and loads to be covered before transport. That tells us two useful things: the physical consistency of biosolids can vary substantially between sources, and experienced operators already treat containment during transport as a practical requirement.

Interstate guidance adds further weight. Victorian EPA guidance recommends fully enclosed or sealed tankers or trailers, water-tight tailgate seals and waterproof covers when transporting biosolids. A NSW Parliamentary inquiry into biosolids transport similarly reported that transport companies carrying biosolids were required to use watertight tailgate seals to prevent leakage, and that trucks carrying biosolids from the Manly treatment plant used mechanically operated steel lids over the loads.

The issue does not end when the truck stops. Queensland's own biosolids rules recognise this at land-application sites by requiring stored biosolids to be kept in bunded areas that prevent stormwater entering or leaving and requiring water collected within those bunds to be managed rather than simply discharged. NSW biosolids guidance similarly requires stockpile areas to have drainage collection, with drainage kept separate from the stored biosolids and not released to surface waters. Victorian requirements also call for bunded storage with an impermeable or low-permeability base designed to capture contaminated runoff.

US EPA guidance is particularly interesting. It notes that dewatered biosolids may release water if the sludge structure changes, including where dewatering polymers break down, and discusses what to do with the accumulated water: mix it back with the biosolids, land apply it, or transport it back for treatment.

None of that proves that every truck carrying 18% biosolids will contain a pool of free water after a 150 km journey. It does, however, establish something important: mobile or separated water associated with dewatered biosolids is a recognised handling problem, not an imaginary one. Queensland's own regulatory framework, practical operating experience and interstate guidance all point in the same direction.

So what does the Glan Devon application say? It refers to truck-and-dog combinations, but that describes the vehicle configuration. It does not tell us whether the trailers are sealed, whether the tailgates are watertight, whether the loads are fully covered, or how any liquid accumulating during transport is contained.

Let's assume BYV already know how to manage those transport issues, although it is still a question that should be asked and answered. Just having a good truck is not the end of the problem. Queensland's own framework recognises both sides of this issue: the biosolids have to be contained during transport, and water associated with stored biosolids has to be contained at the destination. That makes the unanswered question at Glan Devon fairly obvious: what happens between the truck arriving and the biosolids entering the process?

This becomes important when the truck arrives. If liquid has separated from the solids during transport, does the whole load go into a hopper, does liquid drain onto the floor, is there a receiving pit, or are there floor drains or a sump? Is the liquid separately collected or deliberately remixed with the solids, or is it simply assumed that tipping and subsequent handling will somehow put the material back together? The published drawings and documents do not appear to answer those questions. Where does that water go?

The preliminary stormwater plan — a document dealing with a different but related question — says washdown water from inside the operations building will drain to the leachate pond, and that rainfall contacting areas containing biosolids, NRW or mineral fertiliser will also be kept separate from general stormwater. But the drawings we have seen do not show the physical system that achieves this: the floor falls, drains, bunds, sumps, pumps or pipework associated with biosolids receival.

If separated biosolids liquid does end up in the leachate pond, another set of questions immediately appears. What is in that water, how is it sampled and treated, where does it ultimately go, and how are odours from contaminated water stored in the pond managed? These questions matter because contaminants do not necessarily remain evenly distributed between liquid and solid phases. PFAS in particular can partition differently depending on the compound and the chemistry of the material, so once liquid and solids separate the two fractions may no longer have the same contaminant composition.

There is then a completely separate water question: the wheel wash. The DA says runoff and washdown water from the wheel-wash bay will enter an “inbuilt treatment system”, which it says will likely use sedimentation, with the final design to be determined later.

That description raises another series of practical questions. If sedimentation removes solids, what happens to those sediments? They have come off trucks carrying biosolids and other materials and may themselves contain contaminants. If the water is recirculated, contaminants not removed by sedimentation may progressively concentrate in the circulating water. If it is not recirculated, the obvious questions are where the water goes and where sufficient clean make-up water comes from.

The DA says roof water will be captured for use in the wheel wash or as process water, but does not appear to provide a water balance demonstrating that this supply matches wheel-wash demand. That may be entirely manageable in the final design, but at present the published material does not appear to explain the complete wheel-wash water circuit.

None of these questions necessarily means the proposed system cannot work. They do, however, expose an important gap between saying “biosolids arrive by truck, are processed inside a building, and contaminated water will be managed” and actually showing how the material and water move through the facility.

For a plant dealing with thousands of tonnes of wet biosolids each year, that is not a minor detail. Before the development is approved, the complete material and water pathway should be clear: truck → unloading → separated liquid → drainage → collection → treatment → sampling → reuse or disposal. At the moment, too many of those steps remain undefined in the material we have seen.

And, you know, that seems a bit strange to me. We all know how precious water is in this area. We all know the quality of Nanango's own town water is a problem. We all know that managing water is critical for farming. So let's ask the hard questions about water management.

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