These 16,000 piggies a day went to market, no piggies came home.

Some more facts seeped out at a townhall meeting regarding the proposed Triumph packing plant.

By the numbers:

Square feet under roof: 630,000

Acres under development: 116

Property owner: River Stone Group

Cost to construct: $135 to $160 million

Jobs said to be created: "up to" 1000

Water use daily: 2.7 million gallons

Sewage discharge daily: 2.7 million gallons

Hogs processed (stunned, bled, gutted, and butchered) at capacity: 16,000 per day

Heavy trucks entering plant on two-lane Barstow Road filled with hogs daily when plant is at capacity: 3 or 5 per hour, or 72 to 120 semi trucks per day.

Number of live, trampled or crippled squealing hogs per truck: 165 to 175

Heavy trucks leaving plant filled with delicious processed pork products per day: 72 to 120

Total semi traffic in and out of plant: 144 to 240 trucks per day, an average of about one semi every four or five minutes during the two shifts per day.

Cost to Rock Island County taxpayers to improve and widen Barstow Road: $750,000 cool ones.

Cost to East Moline taxpayers to construct a massive dike in the area: unknown and unspecified.

New name for Barstow Road: "Triumph Parkway" (I'm not making this up.)

Date East Moline alderman could vote on approval: December 19th

Date politicians say they will visit Triumph's sister plant in Missouri to see how the operation runs: When it opens in January.

The Dispatch/Argus' Jenny Lee has a great piece of reporting on this. Some highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be.):

East Moline Mayor John Thodos said he takes concerns seriously. "We don't want any smell either." Mayor Thodos, other city officials and community leaders will visit Triumph's St. Joseph plant when it opens, he said.

That facility, however, won't open until January.

Odors most likely would come from manure and rendering -- melting animal fat, Triumph chief executive officer Rick Hoffman said. Odors from rendering would go through three stages of "scrubbers" that would treat odors with chemicals and water before releasing them outside, he said.

Mr. Hoffman said he doesn't foresee Triumph using anaerobic lagoons to store and treat waste -- another common source of packing-plant odor.

Can you say "wiggle room" boys and girls?

It's possible to reduce odors from meat processing plants with certain types of technology, said Dennis Olson, professor of animal science at Iowa State University in Ames.

Premium Standard Farms uses "scrubbers" in the rendering process at its pork processing site in Milan, Mo. The plant, built in 1994, processes 7,000 hogs a day -- 1,000 less than Triumph plans to process at either of its new facilities.

Mr. Olson said he didn't notice much of a smell when he visited Premium's plant.

Wonder if they knew he was coming about a week ahead of time?

Triumph chief operating officer Mark Campbell said the proposed East Moline plant would include an $8 million on-site sewage pre-treatment facility.

Employees would use chemicals to make solids and other elements rise to the top, and solids would be separated from sewer water through several stages, Mr. Campbell said.

As required by the proposed redevelopment agreement between the city and Triumph, contaminant levels would be at certain concentrations before the plants' sewer water would flow into the city's sewer system.

During the Dec. 5 meetings, East Moline superintendent of waste water treatment Dean Piatt said he believed the city's treatment facility could handle the plant's sewage. However, he said he wouldn't know for sure until the proposed plant opened in 2009.

That admission drew cat calls from the audience.

We'll find out if we should have brought a coat once we get off the plane in Nome. Perhaps Mr. Piatt could ask residents to all cross their fingers.

At last week's town hall and council meetings, Mr. Keehner said RiverStone Group has agreed to donate a strip of land east of the proposed site and next to Barstow, so the city can build a dike.