You’re phasing out this year, correct?
I’m transitioning out. I’m working as a temp even though I’m technically retired. The end of the everything is the end of the year. So, as I wrap things up, I’ve been trying bring the guys up to speed with a lot of the stuff I do.
How long have you worked for MWMC?
In one month, it will be 40 years, and I’ve been on this crew all but one-and-a-half of those years. 1983 was when I started. I was 19. The plant was here, but it wasn’t running. They put in a big pipe that connected Springfield to Eugene, because part of that whole thing was getting rid of the Springfield plant and sending all that flow. I was on facilities crew when I first started. We were running river water through (the plant) initially to make sure the equipment worked. It always left a big layer of silt in the bottom of the thing, and so we cleaned a lot of tankage, ran a lot of portable pumps, we had to dewater a lot of stuff. That was a short little time, literally a year. I was on the crew a year and a half.
The first summer, all we basically did was landscaping. We did mowing and weedeating…it’s not even really fair to call it landscaping, because there were no grounds to maintain: it was just brush and grass and field grass. And then I went on to maintenance after that. So I worked through junior high and high school for a metal sculptor doing welding and flame-cutting and that kind of stuff. I went to Lane for a year in machine technology, which also included a lot of welding, a lot of machine shop, lathes, milling machines, that kind of stuff. And then after that year and a half at Lane, I got this temporary job here, and that turned into a permanent job.
So did you always know you wanted to mechanical, hands-on work?
Well I thought I wanted to be a machinist, and now that I see what machinists do, I’m glad I didn’t, because you’re pretty much strapped to a lathe all day, or a milling machine all day, and the next day and the next day. The job I’m doing now, I’m doing different stuff every day.
If you had to describe a typical day for you, what would it be like?
The first thing we do – we start out every day by looking at our telemetry system. They call it SCADA, which is Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. Basically, it’s just the information from the pump stations. Every morning, we get a report on how stuff’s been running the last 24 hours. Then we can go through and take a look at each individual alarm contact or control contact. It’ll tell us exactly when they opened and closed, and then we can see if it’s a weather-related thing or if there’s a piece of equipment that’s not working right. We have things planned, but that takes precedent. There’s not something every day, but I would say every couple of days there’s some problem that occurred over the last 24 hours, and we’ll go out and work on that.
So is it a lot of reactive maintenance?
Actually, in the grand scheme of things, it’s proactive. When I started doing this, you had to drive around to each pump station, and you would inspect it and just find things that were wrong, and we’d fix them. Typically, when you find things that way, it’s like a car that you keep driving when something’s wrong. When we’d get to a pump station, it might have been doing that for a week, and there’s a lot more damage. So we catch stuff a lot quicker now than we used to.
Over the course of 40 years, what changes have you seen to this job and to the cities?
When I first started, the collection system in general was in worse shape, and that means leaky joints, leaky pipes, and stuff getting in. The pump stations were in worse shape. In the winter, you had a lot more storm-related things going on. For example, in West Eugene, every time we would have a good couple of days’ rain, we’d have to bypass to a ditch. It was just a common practice. There was so much water coming through that the pump stations couldn’t keep up, and the standard practice was you’d just turn on the chlorine, set it to a certain level, and you just let it go. You’d come back and check it a couple times a day and make sure everything’s still pretty much the way you set it. Now, we have virtually no storm-related overflows.
It used to be that winters were pretty busy and pretty tense, and if you had a station that was at capacity, and you had one piece of equipment fail, you were in trouble. You were gonna be spilling sewage out. Now, everything, the pump stations, the infrastructure, the plant: it’s all come together to where it pretty much all works the way it’s supposed to. It all goes through the pipes and through the plant and goes back out into the river, clean.
First couple of years I worked here, we used to have a pump station out at the airport that had a lagoon. Nutria used to burrow through the sides of the banks in the lagoon. If we were scheduled to work out at the airport, we were encouraged to take our guns and target practice on lunch, hoping that we would shoot the nutrias. So we took pistols, in a city vehicle, on city time, out to the airport and shot. That ain’t gonna happen today! I will say, no nutria were harmed in the making of my career. We never shot any, we just basically set up targets and shot.
One thing I do miss is that there was a lot of older pump stations that have been replaced. Like 40’s, 50’s, 60’s era technology that you wouldn’t even think of using in a pump station nowadays. Just unique little devices and mechanical ways of controlling equipment.
Controls now are virtually all solid state, very precise. The old stuff relied on a lot of mercury switches. Those mechanical switches were in the control panels, and that’s how most of the stuff was started and stopped. All the old valving to be manual. You’d have to go turn them with a big wheel. I started before we used gas meters. Now you gotta test the atmosphere. The first, I don’t know, five years I worked here, you just pulled the lid, threw a ladder in there, and went down in.
What particularly attracted you to the old, mechanical infrastructure?
It’s kind of like the thing with an old car. You take a Honda Accord now; it does everything better than a ’55 Chevy did. It’s faster, it’s got a better heater, better wipers, better seats, better everything. But when you see a ’55 Chevy going down the road you think, “Hey, that’s a cool car.” That’s kind of the way the old pump stations were. There was kind of a personality to the castings: the way stuff was made. Now everything is cookie cutter, whereas before every pump station was a little different. It's much more efficient to have everything be similar, but it just doesn’t have the personality.
What’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to you on the job?
There’s just been a lot of where we worked with contractors and goofy things happen that are funny to us because we were there. One time, contractors had to cut through one of our lines to do some work, and we had to go out there and shut the station off and drain the line. But we had to meet with the contractor so that we were there when anything happened. We were the City’s representative. They hired a septic truck guy to be there too, in case they spilled any sewage. There’s an open hole there, and we’re talking about different things, and he talks about the lids on septic tanks.
He goes, “Don’t you hate it when you fall in?”
“Fall in?”
“Well, you just get busy and you turn around and you forget that the opening’s there and you fall in.”
“That has never happened to us.”
And he’s like, “It’s happened to me a couple times.”
What do you enjoy doing when you’re off the clock?
My youngest daughter and I go on a backpacking trip every summer. She’s now moved out of state, so I don’t know that that will happen this summer, but that’s something I like to do.
I put thousands of miles on my mountain bike every year. Do a lot of hiking in the summer. Most of my miles are on the bike path here; usually 16 to 28 miles is my daily route. I ride in the winter and the spring and the summer up in the woods on gravel roads. Basically, I’m scouting for deer and elk season.
In the spring, shed antler hunting is about all I do. Deer and elk drop their antlers every year. The real good ones, I’ve got a way of displaying them.
