The Dust Room

The dust room, the first summer I hired on there was a few days that the mill was shut down for maintenance. So there was all kinds of jobs to do cleaning up the place, one job, I remember in particular. Three of us warehousemen were told to go to the ninth floor of the flour mill there was a Humphrey man lift that we rode up there. A Humphrey man lift is a vertical conveyor belt that runs from the second floor of the mill up to the 10th floor, there were 3 foot holes cut through the hardwood floors, the belt ran through them, and there were steps attached to the belt every 22 feet, these steps were about 1' x 18" and were angled with a hinged pivot that would flop over when the belt went over the pulley on the 10th floor, there were also handholds bolted to the conveyor belt at about chest level on both sides of the step. On the second floor, where the belt pulley was mounted, there was a wooden platform with two steps that you climbed up on and waited for the next handle and step to go by. You would then grab handhold and jump on the step, but came up, this would take you up through the eighth floors of machinery, and when you wanted to get off you just had to step backwards on the floor you wanted to get off at. To go down you went to the other side and catch a step going downwards. There was also a safety rope that ran up and down on both sides, and by pulling it the belt would stop in case of an emergency, there was also a safety switch if you forgot to get off on the top floor. To see one in the action try; http://www.humphrey-manlift.com/ Anyways back to my story about the dust room on the left side of the mill building, there are few windows as as part of the mill was used by the elevator to clean grain going into the mill, above the third and fourth windows you can see two small windows with ventilators above them, this was the dust room, where all the dust from cleaning the grain went. To get out there, you had to climb a steel ladder from the ninth floor and open up a trap door to get in there. It was dark in there, with only 4 feet of clearance the dust accumulated was about 6 inches deep and have the properties of a liquid when you try to shovel it up. Our job was to go up there and fill old paper flour sack's with this dust and carry it down the steel ladder to be disposed of. It wasn't a very pleasant job, and I can remember, years later, someone had the brilliant idea of jackhammering a hole through the cement and run a spout down to the ninth floor, where the bags could be loaded and all you had to do was to sweep the dust towards the spout. Years later, a pellet mill was installed, and this material was used in the mixture for making pellets.