Local truck wash could be US model
By KATHRYN MARTINEZ news1@kilgorenewsherald.com

With talks about the nation's troops returning home, the United States is also faced with the return of tens of thousands military vehicles which must be completely sanitized, to United Stated Department of Agriculture standards before re-entering the country.

River Basin Truck Wash, a Kilgore operation, is under the microscope as the location of choice for a study by the United States Army, USDA, US Army Rapid Equipping Force and Exponent Engineers. Top officials from each entity converged on Kilgore, from as far away as California, Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C., to analyze the state-of-the-art cleaning process utilized by River Basin Truck Wash.

Mike Villalobos, owner, said the location was chosen because it is the only operational automated facility in the United States.

"Everything has to be washed and sanitized," Villalobos said. "Today we focused on troop movers and the Humvee, because that is what was available to us, but the Army is looking at utilizing this system to clean much more than vehicles."

According to Dr. Richard Wade, with Exponent, the Army must sterilize everything - tanks, crates and palletized materials.

"All vehicles and equipment must be free of pests, human diseases and animal diseases, Wade said. "Cleaning these items - in the hundreds of thousands - is time consuming, so we are looking to reduce costs by expediting the process."

The way the drive-through - or pull-through - vehicle wash could potentially save millions of US dollars is to eliminate the number of man hours used in cleaning vehicles and reclaim any water used.

"Water is a precious resource everywhere, but especially in the middle east," Wade said. "We believe the system demonstrated here today could save a lot of time and money."

According to Wade the proper sanitation of some military equipment could take as many as 40 man hours.

The process utilized at the truck wash takes less than an hour.

The next step is done through the co-operation of engineers and the US Army Rapid Equipping Force. The entities will redesign the operation to fit the needs in the middle east and ultimately build similar facilities in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

Eric Matteson, US Army Rapid Equipping Force Tech- nology Management Team operations advisor, said the process should move along quickly.

"We are in this to save soldiers' lives and the US Army's money," Matteson said. "We are all about minutes and hours, not days and weeks,"

The truck wash in Kilgore was designed by Inter Clean and built by Marcon Construction, Inc.

The process is automated and takes approximately eight minutes start to finish. Vehicles pull through an oversized driveway to a card-swipe machine, select a particular cleaning cycle then enter the washing bay and two soaping stations. The first half of the wash is low-pressure (80 PSI), but uses approximately 5,000 gallons of water per minute. The vehicles then cross a specially-designed undercarriage cleaner, then through a high-pressure (300 PSI) area with rotating nozzles. Finally vehicles pass through a freshwater rinse.

All of the water used in the was is reclaimed in an 140,000-gallon set- tling tank, treated with oil-diminishing enzymes, then re-used. The only fresh waster used in the operation is during the final rinse.