Nothing like a good fuel thread.
Time for a Saturday night story. So, we offloaded 1 million gallons of ULSD from the Lightweight a couple years ago. Way out on the Aleutian Chain. Made the deal, sighed the contract and took delivery. Except the Dude that’s supposed to do the fuel quality checks, didn’t,...
We ended up with a water in fuel dilution that had been treated with some unidentifiable chemical that kept the water in solution. It would not stratify.
After trying multiple things, to clean it, we acquired a couple giant centrifuges and 100 gallon filter vessels, chartered flights, and rigged plumbing on Blackmer pumps on a fuel truck to kidney loop the bulk tank. Ran two crews, 24 hour coverage to filter and centrifuge one million gallons from one bulk tank to another, spending tens of thousands of dollars to make this fuel meet ASTM spec so we could sell it. I think we still had to blend it with clean fuel to make it acceptable. Spirits were low, tensions were high, yelling and crying and careers were changed when it was all said and done.