Band-aids for Bullet Wounds (AKA: Getting creative)

As many of you know, about half of my job is inspecting facilities. Everything from food processing to pharmaceuticals, healthcare to hospitality, and so much more. That means I get to see a lot of really cool places and a lot of very interesting problems. Ideally, I want to find the source, the underlying conducive conditions, and solutions to completely solve the issue.

Then there’s the reality.

The source isn’t always something obvious. The problem could be widespread enough that tracing it back to any one source isn’t an option. Conducive conditions can vary, and while some might contribute, others may not. There may be no conducive conditions apparent.

Then there are solutions. There is almost always a solution. Some solutions are nice and easy: seal a door, clean up a food source, or switch suppliers. Then there are the solutions that include a great deal of money. Structural repairs can be massive. Sanitation can’t happen every second of the day because then nothing else would happen. Burning down the building usually isn’t received well as a solution. (Yes, I’ve recommended that.)

So if there aren’t available, realistic options, what do we do? We put Band-Aids on.

I often hear that:

They won’t (can’t) clean up, so we can’t do anything.

The door is never going to close, so we can’t do anything.

They won’t (can’t) fix X, so we can’t do anything.

Notice a pattern here? I call laziness on this. It’s an excuse to not use their brain and think. To just give up because it’s easier than trying to work with the customer and the limitations that exist. There is nothing wrong with putting a band aide on a gushing wound. It’s still better than nothing.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Almond moth in a chocolate facility. I won’t even start with the fact that the pest was misidentified because “I knew it wasn’t Indian meal moth, so I just picked another moth”. Obviously, it’s a food plant so there will always be some food material present. There was no “old” food material; no sanitation issues that could be cleaned up that weren’t. No obvious source, no exclusion issues, not a supplier problem. It seemed as if almond moths spontaneously erupted in this one small space.

OMG WTF are we going to do? Treat. Before you start yelling at me through the interweb, I know, treatment shouldn’t be the first choice. However, we have a really good treatment for stored product moths: mating disruption. It uses their own hormones against them and the poor boy moths can’t find the awesome girl moths. No meet-cutes, no mating, no next generation. Problem (mostly) solved.

Next – small flies in a commercial bakery. We typically say that small flies are an “inside” issue and are a sanitation and/or moisture problem. Fix the sanitation, eliminate the small flies. Great, but it’s a bakery….that always has dough…and only shuts down twice a year. The small flies were mostly due to standing water in one particular area. Since this was an older facility, the floor was a bit wonky and didn’t slope directly to the drains anymore. So as much as they squeegeed (is that a real word?) all the water they could to the drains, there was always just a bit left, and of course, it had some dough bits. To fix the floor would have been a massive capital investment and would likely have shut down the facility for at least three months.

OMG WTF do we do? Build a wall. Since this was a relatively localized issue, the site built a plastic “wall” that isolated that area from the dough mixers where the small flies were getting into the product. (ew) By physically isolating that one relatively small area, the small flies were contained in that plastic “room”. It did not solve the problem; the small flies were still there. However, it isolated them away from product and kept them contained so they couldn’t spread.

Pest control isn’t easy. Nor is it perfect. If it were, many other people and I would be out of a job. It’s about using the tools that you have and sometimes getting a little creative to mitigate problems. Putting band-aids on bullet wounds isn’t always a bad thing. If you need some band-aid ideas, let me know, that’s how I help companies.