Fan of Fritts

You could not have picked a better company to use on your cover than Residential Sewage Treatment (Onsite Installer, March 2011). Tom Fritts is an industry mover and shaker! The man is everywhere and puts his whole heart into everything.

Besides being vice president of Residential Sewage, vice president of NOWRA, and serving on both the Missouri and Kansas Smallflows Boards, Tom does educational programs for Missouri Smallflows for installers, regulators, system evaluators and others. He speaks at the Pumper & Cleaner Expo, the NOWRA Conference, the Missouri and Kansas conferences, and anywhere else he is asked.

He is active when there is legislation that affects onsite, working with the state Department of Health and local regulators and testifying at legislative hearings. As president of Missouri Smallflows, it is my privilege to have Tom on our board, to be able to tap into his knowledge, and to call him a friend.

I haven’t met his wife Kathy as yet, but if she is anything like Tom (and from your article it appears that she is), they are truly a dynamic duo.

Janet Murray, REHS

Environmental Health Supervisor

Randolph County (Mo.) Health Department

Flies a Good Thing?

I just read the article about septic flies and larvae in Arizona (Association News, Onsite Installer, February 2011). I have been in business for 15 years. Of the thousands of tanks we have pumped over the years, our experience has been that if we open a tank and find flies, these are the tanks that have good bacteria levels, which promote what we consider to be a healthy septic tank.

So many times we open a tank and find it to be black and non-active or what we consider to be dead. I have even gone as far as collecting some effluent from these tanks with flies and larvae present to introduce to my own tank to seed it, with good results.

I believe the source for this information has the wrong idea about the flies and should embrace this as a natural activity in a normal or healthy operating septic tank. I also believe the flies are introduced through the vent stack.

The practitioner in question should sell this as a natural activity and be thankful for the increased sales due to dead flies plugging those filters, maybe even offering to install larger filters to compensate for the increased plugging. Or maybe it was really time to clean those filters.

Jon Houseknecht

Sunset Septic & Excavating

Rolling Prairie, Ind.