This week, Trail residents will be hearing a loud and unusual hissing noise coming from the Linde plant, near Teck Trail Operations.
Neil Moon, manager at the Linde plant, says not to be alarmed, it is just part of a regular cleaning process.
“I’d say it is a hissing, but multiply that by quite a bit,” he said.
“I think the community gets used to the background noises from Teck and Linde, but this time, they will hear something louder and a different noise.
“We hate to disrupt the community, but it is something that we do about every five years.”
The plant provides water to Teck, liquid oxygen to Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital and different gases, like argon, to computer manufacturers like Intel.
Linde’s distillation columns, for the distilling of air into oxygen, argon and nitrogen, are the part of the plant getting cleaned this week, and Moon says the process will take a couple of days.
“We are going to blow air through the columns at ambient temperature, and as we blow that through the column, it sort of boils off that cooled liquid (argon, oxygen and nitrogen),” he said.
“It is not the conventional boiling where you add electric power.
“The air (we blow through the columns) has such a temperature difference to the liquids that the liquids will heat up and turn to gas, blowing out of the column.
“We just want to let people know that it will only go on for a couple of days and we ask for their patience.”