In the latest addition
to our Water Jobs series, we’re joined by Rick Manner, the Executive Director
at the Urbana Champaign Sanitary District,
who shares his expertise on sanitation engineering and his interest in green
solutions to environmental problems. Prior to his role in Urbana-Champaign,
Rick spent most of his 24 years of wastewater management in Elgin, IL. A University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate in chemical engineering (BS) and environmental
engineering (MS), Rick is a lifelong Cubs fan, which he says means he “always
expects the best, but know[s] that it is unlikely to happen.”
Would you explain
what the Executive Director at the Urbana Champaign Sanitary District does?
I provide the day-to-day administration of the district. We employ 50 people to treat the sewage for
Urbana, Champaign, the University of Illinois, Savoy, and Bondville.
I report to the board of trustees, which provides the
political oversight for the executive director and staff. I recommend and write policy the board may
adopt.
I directly oversee four other directors who work with operations,
maintenance, engineering, and administration.
I develop long-term planning for budget, facilities, and regulatory
compliance.
How many treatment
plants do you oversee, and do they treat different types of wastewater, say
residential or industrial, or both?
We operate two treatment plants. Both treat a mixture of all types of sewage
from the community. (Industrial sources
are obliged to pretreat their flows so that they are compatible with the
treatment operations.)
Also, as a point of information, the district owns and
maintains 25 pump stations, about 10% of the local sewers in neighborhoods just
outside of Urbana and Champaign, and all of the interceptor sewers – the large
diameter sewers that intercept smaller sewers on their way to our treatment
plants. I mention these because, from an
asset management standpoint, they comprise a third asset that is just as
important and valuable as the two treatment plants.
Where does the
treated water from the Urbana-Champaign treatment plants go?
We discharge our treated water (effluent) to the creeks that
our treatment plants are next to: the Saline Branch of the Salt Fork and the Copper
Slough. Ultimately these are feeders to
the Vermillion River and the Kaskaskia River, respectively.
Does the amount of
water released by the plant change from season to season?
The amount released is equal to the amount that is received
on a given day. What goes in comes
out. Since the amount received depends
upon soil moisture and recent precipitation, our flows are strongly influenced
by the amount of precipitation in any season.
What kind of training
and experience did you need to be qualified for this type of position?
An executive director can have various qualifications. Usually you bring some strength in one of the
areas that you oversee. This is
especially true at a facility of this size (50 employees), or smaller. With that, you pick up some of the workload
in that sub-area [i.e. operations, maintenance, engineering, and
administration]. If you lack that, you
are typically more of a generalist with a background in administration. Some executive directors come from experience
in law, organized labor, or with one of the major industries in town.
Since your background
is in engineering, would you explain how you became interested in engineering,
and why environmental engineering?
I have always enjoyed and had some proficiency with math,
chemistry, technical issues, problem solving, and environmental issues. Obtaining a chemical engineering degree
seemed like one of the tougher technical problems to solve at college, and the
salary looked good, too. It didn’t hurt
that chemists and chemical engineers learn how to make things change color,
burn, or explode. So I started with chemical
engineering.
As I finished my BS degree, I did not have a job in hand,
and I had really enjoyed the environmental engineering classes I had taken in
my final three semesters of undergraduate school. I asked an environmental engineering
professor if I could work with him as a graduate student. He had an opening, and so I began working on
a master’s degree in environmental engineering.
I feel that working for the environment is giving back to
society. Working in this way appeals to
me, because it is using my talents and interests in an area that I think is
important for us to do better than we have been. When I evaluated the various branches of
environmental work, I found that wastewater treatment has the greatest direct
impact on environmental health.
On behalf of our
student audience, could you tell us if engineering allowed you to enjoy any
exciting adventures, and what were they?
For me solving any problem is quite a thrill. I am not sure I would use the words “exciting
adventures,” but that is very satisfying for me.
Solving a bigger problem with permanent implications is more
rewarding than only working on small, temporary problems. So moving up in my responsibility has allowed
me to be a part of more complex problem solving. By helping design and develop the best
treatment plant that I can, I am solving how we get wastewater treated
economically and efficiently in Urbana, Champaign, and the area generally. We work on these problems thinking with a 50-year
and longer perspective. We are shaping
what the community will become.
In addition, as an executive director at a facility that is
a leader in the industry, I hope that I am a part of solving national and
international environmental issues. Improving
the aquatic environment, climate change, and energy efficiency are all problems
worth my work.
We’ve read that you
believe sanitation engineering is the original green industry—would you elaborate
on that for us?
Sustainability, or “living green,” is basically doing
everything in a cyclical way. If we
recycle something 100%, we are being very sustainable, or very green.
As a sanitary district, for 90 years, our whole reason for
existence is to take billions of gallons of sewage every year, a waste product that
can spread disease, and eliminate the disease potential. We do that by cleaning the sewage, separating
the water and the solids and treating them.
When we are done the water can be safely returned to the aquatic
environment and the solids can be used as a fertilizer and soil
conditioner. This completes the cycle, with
100% of what you give to us going to good use.
One area that we have not been completely self-sufficient
has been energy usage. To do our job, my
energy budget is about $800,000 per year.
We have been as energy efficient as possible to save money. We currently produce 90% of the natural gas
we need for heating and 35% of the electricity we use. Our goal is to improve these numbers without
wasting money, another important resource.
How do the treatment
plants produce natural gas and electricity?
It
all comes from treating the solids. Once they are separated from the main
flow of water, we thicken them and then treat them in anaerobic (without air) digesters.
This is another simple natural process. We cover the tanks holding the
solids. The covers prevent oxygen from getting in, keeping the process
anaerobic. Over the course of several days in these conditions, some of
the microbes produce methane, which is often called natural gas, or around
here, digester gas. We use the term digester gas to differentiate the gas
we produce from the gas we purchase, because functionally they are almost
identical.
That
digester gas is used as the energy source for generators that we operate.
The generators produce the electricity. Burning the gas in the generators
also means they heat up quite a bit. We transfer that extra heat into
water that is used to both heat water and buildings within the plant.
We’ve also heard a
lot of discussion about a predicted “brain drain” in the water treatment
industry when baby boomers retire over the next ten years. Do you see that
happening at the Urbana Champaign Sanitary District?
I don’t attribute the very real retirement surge that we are
seeing as being related to baby boomers as much as to the fact that it’s been
40 years since the passage of Clean Water Act of 1972. With that law there was a big hiring surge in
the wastewater industry, and environmental work, generally. The best and the brightest in that group of
workers excelled in the field and became leaders in the industry. Many of those people were fresh out of high school
or college in the 1970s, so they are retiring as a group.
At UCSD we had five retirements in one year, whereas we
typically had one retirement every few years in the twenty years before
now. We expect two or three retirements per
year to be the new normal for a while.
So we are seeing that happen, but we will hire good people and get
through this.
What kinds of
opportunities or challenges do you think this will create in the industry?
There will be lots of changes and lots more room for
promotion than there has been before now.
So this will behave much more like a growth industry even though it is
quite mature.
Succession planning – planning personnel decisions for the
next several years – will make the changes less traumatic. Hiring good people is important. Training of staff who will remain is essential.
Picking the right people to fill positions of leadership is very
important. So far, for places of my size,
I have found that filling in who will be THE leader in a sub-group is often
pretty obvious because the best in a group of experienced personnel is often
obvious. That leader is often the
“right-hand-man” of the current leader.
That’s the person who gets things done.
Finding the person to replace the “right-hand-man” is often the most
difficult decision.
And how can those
interested in future water careers develop their skills to meet these
challenges and opportunities?
First, hone your technical skills. If you don’t have them you probably won’t be
able to work here. Even if you don’t
like math or science, learn as much as you can.
Next, practice good communication skills. If you can’t effectively and efficiently communicate
what you know, you are less valuable to any employer. This can be done as a student or in other
areas of life. Finally, seek out ways to
improve your critical decision-making.
This can come from athletics, mental challenges, or other areas. Try to increase the complexity of the
problems you solve. Don’t just do what
is easy or you’ve done before. Challenge
yourself to make decisions and accept the only way to avoid failure is to never
try something challenging.
What do you wish
people understood or appreciated about wastewater treatment in Illinois?
Your day-to-day decisions matter to the environment. What you buy, use, and dispose of all
matter. Think globally in all of your
actions.
We only treat what you choose to make a waste. We do it as efficiently as possible, but
there are unavoidable costs. As a
society, we should choose to pay these costs because the future of the aquatic
environment is worth it. We should not
drain its value just because we can.
If someone wanted to
visit the treatment plants, how would he or she go about doing that?
Our tours typically last an hour, but can run longer if
there are lots of questions. We held an open
house last October 6th with six hours of displays and tours
available. We had about 200 people show
up. I considered it a great success, so
we will continue the tradition.
This year’s open house will be on September 21, 2013 from 9
AM to 3PM. There is no advance notice necessary, just
come by and we’ll show you what we do.
We aim to make every open house more interesting than the last one.
We also offer scheduled tours for classes and other groups
of high school and older groups throughout the year. We give about 50 tours per year that way to
another 300 visitors. Calling our phone
number of (217) 367-3409 and saying that you’d like a tour is the way to
start. We like to know how many people
to expect, what their ages are, and what background they have regarding
wastewater or the environment, to give the most appropriate tour possible.
And finally, forgive
us if this is a rude question, but we’re so curious: do people ever respond
with an “ew, gross” when they find out what you do, and how do you handle that?
The most common response is that people are interested in my
work, because it is an area that many people have no idea about. I certainly enjoy that response.
The “ew, gross” response is also quite common, and I sort of
enjoy the challenge of turning that person into somebody who finds my work
interesting, even if they could never do it.
If they want to stay perpetually grossed out, I can’t change that, and I
let them live in ignorance.
The first tour that I ever gave was to a classroom of 20 youngsters
who got off the bus and plugged their noses and were all saying “ew, gross.” I pointed out that the gross aspects of the
sewage are what we treat, and they would not be grossed out once we got to the
end of our plant. And at least most of
them weren’t.
I explained that before there was sewage treatment, the
gross sewage was dumped straight into the river untreated. That made the whole river gross. Today, our treatment cleans the sewage enough
so that they can go by rivers without holding their noses or fearing that
exposure to the water will give them typhoid fever or cholera. These were waterborne diseases that regularly
killed thousands of people in Illinois.
It is nice knowing that sanitary districts are so effective at our jobs
that most people have never known anybody who has had these diseases.
