Today, as we were walking we noticed clouds in the sky when the sun came up.  We walk  at 6:15-7:00 am when it is relatively dark and we can think it is cool.  The forecast had no rain.  At breakfast, the cardinal, ground dove, house finch, and young Blue Jay competed with the sparrows and White Winged Dove for the bird seed.  We were working outside in the morning and had just a mist as a thunderhead came over.  I looked up to see if the birds were spitting on me.

In the early afternoon, it actually sprinkled enough to get the ground wet, if you were in the right place.  My sister, only two blocks over,  said she said drops on the grass, but the sidewalks didn’t get wet.

Strangers stopped to chat with us in the parking lot of the “do-it-yourself” hardware store.  At the doctor’s office, I and the staff talked about going out to the lot naked and having a rain dance, if that would make it rain harder.

All in all, a good day.  It stayed in the low 90′s.

The WJTA- IMCA WaterJet Technology Association-Industrial & Municipal  Cleaning Association is holding their biannual conference and Expo of  September 19-21, 2011 at the George R Brown Convention Center in Houston  TX. go to www.wjta.org to register.

Plan to attend if you are cleaning anything from sewage, to parking lots, to bridges, or cutting with water- at all pressures, or if you use vaccuum trucks in your business.

There are workshops, boot camps, and live demonstrations as well as the largest global exhibition for waterjet and water blast equipment.

If you are using waterblasters, pressure washers, or waterjetting equipment, you should have on site
1. Recommended Practices for the US of High Pressure Waterjetting Equipment
-available in English and Spanish.
2. Video or cd- Waterjetting Equipment- 30 minutes
3. Medical alert cards for each person on site.
4. Recommended Practices for the Use of Industrial Vacuum Equipment
5. Video or cd- Vacuum Equipment.

Contact the Advisory Council if you would like a general Operations Module. It contains the WJTA Video and “Recommended Practices,” some suggested personnel safety policies that are specific to waterjetting and not covered in current OSHA regulations, five laminated cards for individual workers, and some suggested topics for in-house training courses for your workers.

This Advisory Council module does not contain a self-help, self-testing text. It is not a certification procedure. Pressure Washing and Waterjetting are used in so many different applications that the general training course would need to be customized for site specific projects.