Tag: kansas

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News from the Road: Chase County, Kansas

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On the recent Chicago-Berkeley peregrination, we stopped in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. One draw is the nearby Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, in the Kansas Flint Hills. It’s beautiful country. The town itself has a reputation as a well-preserved prairie village. It’s the county seat, and the courthouse is said to be the oldest still in use in Kansas (or west of the Mississippi, depending on who you believe). Broadway, the main street stretching north from the courthouse, is brick-paved. It is bordered by some handsome old buildings, including a hotel said to have a decent restaurant. We stopped for lunch at the Emma Chase Cafe and had burgers and fries; sweet-potato fries, in my case; never had them before.  

We picked up the local paper, the Chase County Leader-News, which ran the following story at the bottom of the front page on April 9. The story never says so–the locals must just know it–but the R3 Energy plant at the center of this incident is using chicken fat (among other things) as a raw material for biodiesel fuel. I had never thought of chicken fat that way before (a story earlier this week in the Arkansas Daily Gazette mentions that Tyson Foods, a big chicken processor, has a renewable energy group and is building a plant in Louisiana “to make high-grade biodiesel and jet fuels from Tyson-produced nonfoodgrade animal fats such as beef tallow, pork lard, chicken fat and greases.” I am way behind on my alternative energy news).

Six months before the incident, the Emporia Gazette ran a rather long article on the new biofuels plant in Cottonwood Falls. It was put up by a local family looking to get into a new business. It was a win for everyone–until the chicken fat spill.

R3 cleaning up spill

City Utility Supervisor
informs council of
chicken fat spill at R3

Jerry Schwilling
Chase County Leader-News

City Utility Supervisor Ron Lake informed the Cottonwood Falls City Council at its Monday, April 6, meeting that he had discovered a large amount of chicken fat at the city’s sewer lagoons Friday, April 3.

The chicken fat had run through the sewer line from R3 Energy to a lift station and from there onto the ground around the lift station.

Lake said when he discovered the chicken fat he asked R3’s Mike Swartz about it and Swartz said it was chicken fat that had been spilled at R3.

Swartz said Tuesday, April 7, that the spill had occurred when a truck was off-loading at the plant. The truck’s equipment, Swartz said, had malfunctioned spilling the chicken fat on the ground in the plans off-loading catchment area.

That area is designed to catch any spill and divert it either to the plant’s lagoon or the city’s lagoon. The decision was made to divert the spill to the city’s lagoon, Swartz said.

However, the lift station on the sewer line malfunctioned and the chicken fat spread on the ground around the lift station instead of going into the lagoon.

Swartz said the chicken fat was biodegradable and posed no ecological threat.

Lake told the council that he was required by the state to report the spill and to have it cleaned up.

Lake said that Swartz told him the spill had occurred on March 26. R3 did not report the spill to the city, Lake said.

Swartz said he reported the spill to two city employees the day it occurred and was told that Lake was not available.

R3, Swartz said, was having the lift station steam cleaned Tuesday, April 7, and had contracted a skid loader to pick up and dispose of the chicken fat on the ground at the city’s lagoons. He said he expected the clean up to be completed by the end of the day, Tuesday, April 7.

The council directed [city attorney?] North to send R3 a letter asking R3 to clean up the spill in the next seven days or the city would contract to have it cleaned up and bill R3.

The council also asked North to look into the creation of an ordinance to deal with any future spill.

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Road Blog: Kansas City to Lamar, Colorado

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Got a late start from Kansas City this morning, and took our time in Chase County–home of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve–before doing some serious driving starting at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, we had lunch in Cottonwood Falls, the Chase County seat, and since we had just one key for the car and were concerned about locking it in the car–we stopped by a general dry good store with a sign that said it made keys. Getting the spare key was a half-hour process that involved the store proprietor expressing doubts about his ability to cut a two-sided key, a long search through the blanks he had in stock, and a digression about a locking gas cap that once had failed him. We did not hurry him along. Finally, he chose a blank he thought might work since he didn’t have the one specified for our Toyota Echo, and cut it with no problem. He said he thought it would work in the car, took our buck-eighty, and we were on our way. The new key works fine and all we have to remember to do now is not to leave the spare key in the car where we won’t be able to retrieve it when we lock the other one inside the vehicle.

We also wasted some time trying to locate Kansas Highway 150, which our map sort of implied might head west from Cottonwood Falls. Eventually we found it, but not before driving back and forth on a back road that goes past the town fishing lake and through a dying hamlet called Elmdale–still on the map–just off U.S. 50.

Elmdale looked desolate and much the worse for wear. Only one business appeared to exist in town–a grocery that except for the soda vending machines outside looked like it might be shut down. Just down the main street from there was a small edifice built from the same sandy-colored limestone that appears in many substantial buildings in the area. It was the city hall, built (according to an inscription at the lower right of the picture) by the Works Progress Administration in 1936.

Chris remarked that the place reminded him of a desperately poor town in eastern Kentucky, Pineville, that we had driven through with our dad in 1966. The shattered houses, some abandoned, some still occupied, reinforced the impression. So did the scruffy city park and the nearly empty streets. The one sign of activity was someone unloading a truck full of wooden pallets, adding them to the hundreds of pallets already stacked near one home. I wondered whether they were intended as firewood.

There’s a story to the town, one that naturally is not evident from a five-minute look at the place. By way of the town’s Wikipedia entry, I came upon a terrific (though undated) story from the Emporia Gazette that chronicles the town’s decline over the past 60 years, mostly due to a series of floods. The piece is accompanied by some nice shots from a Michigan photographer, Galen Frysinger.

Trip coordinates:

Departure point from Chicago: 42 degrees, 0 minutes, 32 seconds N. latitude
87 degrees, 41 minutes, 21 seconds W. longitude

Day One stop: 39 degrees, 6 minutes, 52 seconds N.
94 degrees, 45 minutes, 46 seconds W.

Day Two stop: 38 degrees, 6 minutes, 13 seconds N.
102 degrees, 37 minutes, 6 seconds W.

Home (Berkeley): 37 degrees, 52 minutes, 39 seconds N.
122 degrees, 16 minutes, 53 seconds W.

Comment: We’re within a quarter degree of our destination latitude. We’re about 20 degrees east of it. I don’t believe we’ll find a straight-line route.

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Monday Dribblings

Text vs. image: The New York Times has a sort of character essay this morning on father and son farmers in Lebanon, Kansas (the geographic center of the lower 48 states). It’s a good enough piece, though it tries to do too much–relate the end of a way of life and a son’s break with his father–with too little–maybe 500 words. As it happens, the text is accompanied by a video version of the piece. The story follows much the same outline, but it’s different: For one thing, you get to hear and see the reporter play his role, gently prompting a couple of the the answers the son gives in the story. You also get to see the way the dad plays to the camera when he’s talking to the son. At the same time, the father and son come off as more compelling characters; the kid especially seems a little guilty and torn about leaving the farm for school. The video version comes off as the better piece of storytelling; if nothing else, the beautiful visuals make it worth watching.

The other Foley scandal: Let me add my voice to those decrying the emails of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.). I don’t need to rehash the story. But I think something has gone unmentioned in the furor over his come-ons to young congressional pages: His disgraceful prose style. For example, one email read:

“glad your home safe and sound…we dont go back into session until Sept 5,,,,si its a nice long break….I am back in Florida now…its nice here…been raining today…it sounds like you will have some fun over the next five weeks…how old are you now?…”

Maybe the congressman was just trying to adopt the breezy style of instant messaging (“cul8r!”) to demonstrate he was an electronic communications hepcat. His IMs with another page show he was a master of the form (“Maf54 (7:37:27 PM): how my favorite young stud doing”) despite his advanced age and high station. If so, he was going too far. Email accommodates a certain degree of informality–“Hey, guy” can substitute for the stuffy “Dear Hunk,” for example–but it is not an invitation to abandon form altogether, as Foley did. He seems incapable of maintaining a thought long enough to type it.

Foley would have done well to follow the example of one of his young correspondents, who shows an admirable respect for standard orthography and makes a game if less than perfect attempt to employ proper capitalization and punctuation:

“What happened was I gave certain people Thank-you cards, you know? I gave Foley one because he was a really nice guy to me and all. Then, he asked me to write my e-mail on the back of his. So I was like, ‘sure!’ because of course I had no suspicions.”

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Treasure Hunt

It’s very quiet here. Thom just returned to Oregon; he and Kate left with a minivan-load full of stuff yesterday morning, and he’s busy getting his house set up in Eugene. Kate’ll be back this evening. Scout, the dog, is morose.

I just came back from Chicago — well, I came back on Tuesday. Tomorrow, I’m flying to Denver to do a 90-hour, 750-mile ride, the Colorado Last Chance 1200. That’s a staggering thought, actually; I was on a waiting list and didn’t really expect to get in. Then on Thursday, I got an email saying a spot had opened up. I trained to do one of these long rides this year and was hoping to do the Cascade 1200 in Washington state. But I fell off my bike three weeks before that event and wasn’t really healed completely when the time came to ride (what I missed was four days of very tough and very, very hot riding). But over the summer, I got back into a pretty good riding rhythm and now I’m going to Colorado.

The route is through eastern Colorado and out into northern Kansas, principally on U.S. 36 ((the Kansas portion of the route has its own booster’s association, which is planning a weekend of garage sales from one end of the highway to the other starting next Friday: “The First Annual Great U.S. Highway 36 Treasure Hunt.” The easternmost point in the ride, Kensington, Kansas, is in Smith County; back in America’s 48-state days, the county was the site of the geographical center of the United States, near the town of Lebanon. This is a part of the country that has been losing people for over a century. For instance, census numbers show Smith County’s population fell more than 75 percent between 1900 (when there were 16,384 residents recorded ) and 2005 (4,121, down 9 percent just since 2000). You could pick almost any county out there in the dry Plains and find the same story. So then you get attractions like the Great Treasure Hunt as a way of drawing people out there to see what they’re missing (lots of fresh air, lots of room, lots of quiet, lots of homes that look cheap by comparison with what big-city folks are used to. The problem is, people who say they’d like all that, and I’m one, would like all that in moderation or in carefully controlled doses; and they still need someplace to go to work to support their wide-open-spaces lifestyle.

Looking forward to seeing it all, though, even though I think I’ll miss the Great Treasure Hunt

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