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By Dan Rafter
Workboots caked with mud. Pants dripping sludge.
That’s the work attire Andy Davis prefers. His preferred office? Dirty fields, muddy holes and fresh construction sites.
Sure, Davis may occasionally have to resort to wearing a suit and tie. He may need to spend a day sitting at a desk making business calls. He may even have to trudge through something as dreary as inventory duty. But give Davis his choice? He’d rather be slogging through the mud as contractors install one of the decentralized wastewater systems that he helped design.
Davis in 2003 founded New Water Systems in Little Rock, AR, designing and selling decentralized wastewater systems. Business has been good ever since. In just the company’s first year, Davis and his partners installed three Orenco Advantex treatment systems. The following year, on the heels of more growth, New Water became an ECCI company, when Davis sold his young business to the prominent Arkansas engineering firm of Engineering, Compliance and Construction Inc.
Today, New Water Systems provides general wastewater collection products for any size or type of small sewer system. The company’s territory has expanded to include Missouri and Oklahoma. And Davis still likes getting his boots covered with mud.
Just a typical decentralized success story? Not quite. Davis is a rarity. He’s only 31, and started his business when he was just 28.
Ask veterans of the onsite water treatment industry and they’ll tell you that it’s difficult, sometimes near impossible, to attract young talent like Davis to the business.
Maybe that’s not a surprise. Working with wastewater is hardly a glamorous field. Engineering students fresh out of college are more apt to work in the fields of transportation, building and computer science, where they’re not likely to spend long hours tramping through muddy construction sites.
Davis, project engineer with New Water Systems, understands this. Transportation engineers, electrical engineers and civil engineers work on projects that can fuel the imagination. Davis, though, doesn’t envy any other profession. Even when he studied civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, he dreamed of working in the decentralized business. In his view, a well-working decentralized system serving a growing housing subdivision is just as magnificent as is any highway expansion or towering skyscraper.
After all, the decentralized system is placing far less strain on the environment than is that big metal-and-glass skyscraper or all those twisting lanes of asphalt.
“I don’t think people really understand what decentralized is all about,” Davis said. “It’s a relatively new field. It’s growing so quickly, and changes are coming at such a rapid pace. It’s something new that not every other engineer out there is doing. I see in the future a huge demand in this business. I think a lot of people are going to be interested in decentralized wastewater systems.”
Davis’ story is a good one. Problem is, it’s too rare. The struggle to attract young talent to the decentralized wastewater industry is an ongoing one. Industry officials, though, are trying to change this. They’re trying to teach engineering students that the onsite field is booming, and that the industry offers more than enough challenges to keep the brightest engineers busy.
Is the message getting out?
Slowly. But, industry officials say, progress is being made.
The Need For Inspiration
Kitt Farrell-Poe knows exactly what the industry needs to attract more young engineers: inspiring professors who are committed to teaching why decentralized wastewater systems are a growing option for many municipalities.
Problem is, there aren’t enough teachers out there who have ever worked with decentralized wastewater systems.
Farrell-Poe has. She is a water-quality specialist and a professor in the department of agricultural and bio-systems engineering at the University of Arizona. She’s active, too, with the Consortium of Institutes for Decentralized Wastewater Treatment, a group of educational institutions that cooperate on wastewater training and research efforts. One of the group’s goals? To spread the word about the growing field of decentralized wastewater treatment.
“The problem is that there are just not that many engineers who are trained in this field, who took any courses on decentralized at the university level,” Farrell-Poe said. “If there are no champions for this field at the university level, we’re not going to attract young people.”
Farrell-Poe knows this first-hand.
“When I was getting my engineering degree, I had maybe one chapter, if even, on onsite treatment,” she said.
The members of the consortium hope to change this by addressing the problem head-on. Group members worked together to create a standard curriculum designed to expose university engineering and science students to decentralized wastewater treatment options.
The curriculum covers the fundamental principles of decentralized wastewater treatment, planning systems, soil and site evaluation, troubleshooting and resolution, regulatory and permit issues, on-site technology and system and materials management.
So far, at least seven universities across the country are using at least some elements of the curriculum, Farrell-Poe said.
Farrell-Poe already teaches a similar course for the University of Arizona: Design of Onsite Wastewater Treatment Systems. The three-credit, online-only course covers the design of simple and specialized treatment systems, the operation and monitoring of simple and complex systems, septage management and water reuse.
The university offers the course every spring. Last spring, 12 students took the online course. Two of them, Farrell-Poe says, have expressed interest in possibly working in the field.
That may seem like a small success, but it is a success, nonetheless. Inspiring engineering students at the university level remains the key to bringing younger talent to the field, Farrell-Poe said.
“The mentoring provided by perceptive and dedicated professors is badly needed out there,” she said. “I don’t know, though, how to get this to happen. It’s not a sexy field. And students don’t really see a lot of decentralized. What they see more often are the big-pipe projects. You can’t force professors into teaching something that they’re not interested in.”
The problem will only grow when professors and champions of the field like Farrell-Poe retire. If no one is available to step in and teach Farell-Poe’s decentralized course after she retires, then the course will most likely disappear, along with the hope of inspiring more students to give onsite a try.
A Mentor
Davis, the young civil engineer behind New Water Systems, gives credence to Farrell-Poe’s words. His inspiration, the reason he entered the field three years ago? A professor at the University of Arkansas who taught about the field with passion.
“I had an excellent professor,” Davis said. “I was going to take anything that he taught. If he would have taught structural engineering, I’d probably be designing structures right now. He was so passionate about the field.”
That professor was Mark Gross, who is now an engineer working with Orenco Systems Inc., one of the biggest names in wastewater treatment.
Gross remembers Davis, and considers him a rarity in the business: an engineering student who was inspired enough to stray from electrical or mechanical engineering and forge his own career in the decentralized business.
“I can tell you why people like Andy are so rare: We are not teaching onsite in the engineering curriculum at a majority of universities,” Gross said. “The engineering curriculum is so full right now. By the time we cover the conventional treatment stuff, there is not enough time to deal with the decentralized stuff.”
Typically, decentralized wastewater is offered as a technical elective. Mostly seniors are able to take such electives.
But these senior students have plenty of options available to them when it comes time to select their electives. Professors, then, make the difference. Dynamic professors who have earned solid reputations will attract students to an elective.
Those without this style? Their electives will attract students only as a last resort.
“How do we get the dynamic professors teaching those courses? That’s a challenge,” Gross said. “Most of the professors have never been exposed to onsite treatment, either. Unless it’s crouched in terms of green solutions, onsite doesn’t get much play.”
Once students graduate from college, they typically head off to work in consulting engineering firms. These firms are in business to make money, and they tend to tackle work that will earn them high profits. This works against decentralized treatment.
When consulting engineers have to spend long hours learning a new treatment method—such as onsite—only to apply it to a one-time project, they end up decreasing their profits. If the market for onsite was bigger, and these consulting engineers had more decentralized projects to look forward to, perhaps then the extra effort to learn decentralized methods would pay off.
“I have had students who were interested in decentralized. But once they got out of school and went to work, it was almost as if the opportunities weren’t there,” Gross said. “Most of them ended up working for consulting firms doing mostly centralized treatment.”
Gross hopes that with decentralized slowly picking up steam across the world, a greater number of engineering firms will include it in their services.
When will this happen? Gross can’t predict. He’s been hearing rosy predictions for too long regarding a coming onsite popularity boom that has yet to happen.
“Look at the United States. Our infrastructure is in dire need of repair,” Gross said. “We’ve all seen lots of stories about the decentralized approach and how it really is the way to go. But when we are doing big projects, we don’t give decentralized a look. We’re not doing anything but attaching more people to the grid.”
Banking On A Bright Future
In late September, 27-year-old Tyler Molatore, a systems engineer with Orenco, traveled to Camdenton, located in the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri. He spent most of the week taking water samples and testing just how well several of his firm’s decentralized wastewater treatment systems were working.
Molatore also met with several consulting engineering firms, discussing future onsite projects with them and training them in the fundamentals of installing a decentralized treatment system.
Back when he was a mechanical engineering student at Oregon State University—which wasn’t all that long ago—Molatore never imagined that he might be working with wastewater.
“It wasn’t a very attractive or glamorous industry,” Molatore said. “I didn’t know anything about it, really.”
Molatore basically fell into the field, landing a job at Orenco through the university’s career services department. He’s now thrilled with the position, and enjoys the different challenges that the industry throws at him near daily. He also enjoys the creative side to the business, designing decentralized systems and tweaking them so that they best serve the commercial or residential clients that plan on using them.
If it wasn’t for the career services department, though, Molatore may never have found the field. That’s a problem.
“I think there are barriers to this field simply because it is not a topic that is taught,” Molatore said. “There are a few out there who teach the subject, but for the most part, it’s not in the engineering curriculum at all. I didn’t know it existed. They do teach wastewater on the university level, but in terms of decentralized you don’t hear much at all. If you don’t hear it at school, it doesn’t give you much confidence to search for it in the field.”
Molatore has now worked in the decentralized field for just more than four years. During this time, he says, he’s tackled several interesting projects. He’s notched several memorable successes, too.
There was the time he traveled to Bethel Heights, a small community in Arkansas that ranks as one of the fastest-growing areas of the country. To serve this growing area, community officials decided to go with a decentralized wastewater system. Molatore advised these officials throughout the entire process, eventually helping them choose an effluent sewer with step collection and a subsurface drip dispersal. Molatore helped install the treatment system three years ago. It’s been working well ever since, he said.
The project wasn’t a simple one. Molatore was continually called on to answer questions from town officials. He assisted the engineers in designing the system and drafting its specifications. After the town gained approval for the system—which was also a lengthy process—Molatore helped with its installation and its official startup. He’s returned to Bethel Heights frequently since, to make sure the system is still working properly.
“A lot of people don’t understand how much engineering goes into developing one of these systems,” Molatore said. “That’s just one example. This job is constantly offering something different and challenging.”
And if more young engineers understood this, Molatore said, perhaps the industry wouldn’t be struggling as much to attract them.
“They really need to teach this more in school,” he said. “There just aren’t that many programs out there. It’s hard to convince engineers that designing decentralized systems can be interesting and challenging. If it’s not taught in school, the students won’t even think about decentralized.”
Molatore sees another challenge: There aren’t all that many reputable equipment manufacturers in the onsite wastewater treatment business. It can be hard for a young student to find a good job with a strong company. Many system manufacturers, in fact, don’t even employ engineers.
This is one reason why Molatore feels lucky to have learned, quite by accident, about the field.
“Oh, I’m very happy with this field,” he said. “There is quite a bit of opportunity. It’s a growing industry, and there’s a lot of job security. Sewage isn’t going to stop flowing.”
A Biased Education?
It’s been nearly a decade since engineer Richard Jex entered the decentralized wastewater industry fresh out of college. Jex isn’t sure that he still qualifies as a “young” engineer, but he does remember how lost he felt when he first entered the business.
“When I was offered my first job in the field, I recognized that I would be working full-time in a field that was covered in part of one lecture during my school years,” Jex said. “I had been assigned one or two homework problems on sizing a septic system and pit privy. Not exactly a fair representation of the industry.”
Jex, who formerly worked for the state of Utah, now is an engineer with Orenco, and he thoroughly enjoys his job. He considers this a bit of a miracle, considering what he learned, or didn’t learn, about decentralized when he was a student.
“I had not learned much about the field while at the university,” he said. “In fact, most of my wastewater classes taught that septic systems were problematic, and that conventional sewer needed to be extended to all areas with septic systems. That mindset is often encountered while working in the field. I believe it affects young engineers’ opinions of the field. More objective emphasis on the subject at the universities would definitely help.”
Peg Cashell, instructor with the Utah Onsite Wastewater Training Program, said that most onsite professionals come to the field later in their careers. The reason for this? Again, it comes down to the instruction young engineers are receiving at universities.
“You don’t get onsite experience at most universities,” Cashell said. “Those of us who do get into it get it through our graduate programs.”
There also is relatively little research money available for onsite studies and experiments, Cashell said, something that also discourages young engineers from entering the field.
Funding for the field usually doesn’t arrive until municipalities face sudden density problems, Cashell said. The number of residences and businesses threatens to overwhelm existing centralized systems, and municipal officials finally begin to explore decentralized options.
It’s a shame that so few young engineers are entering the field, Cashell says, for the onsite business has room for bright minds of all kinds.
“What I love about this field is that there is room for all sorts of professionals in this industry,” she said. “You have to have people who know the soils, so that you can install the right kind of system in an area. You need the people who can engineer the system, the people who can install a system. In our training classes, we teach health-department people, installers, a while big mix of people. Everyone has to work together for this to work right. If the system is not installed properly, it’s not going to work. If it’s put in perfectly according to the plans, but the plans don’t work, then the system won’t work. It’s real life kind of stuff. That’s what this has afforded me, a science I can use in a very applicable way.”
Davis, the young engineer who started his own company in Arkansas, understands this, too.
He recently traveled to Mayflower, AR, to inspect a 10-year-old recirculating sand filter system that had begun to perform less efficiently. The owner of the 40-home subdivision the system served was concerned that he’d have to incur some major expenses to expand and improve the system.
Davis, though, had good news: Engineers with Orenco merely had to adjust some timer settings and flow measurements, and make a few minor chemical additions to improve the system’s performance significantly, reducing the wastewater’s BOD level from 9 all the way to less than 1.
“That was a case that was really gratifying for me,” Davis said. “I was able to show that the system was capable of handling the waste it was getting. There was no need for a major expansion of it.”
The work, of course, wasn’t what engineering students typically think about when pondering their future careers. But for Davis, it was the perfect way to spend a workday or two.
“I was out there in the field just the other day wearing my muddy boots and jeans, changing flows on a new treatment system we’d just started up,” he said. “I enjoy that part of the job quite a bit. It’s a part that engineers don’t get to do enough of. It’s valuable, though, for an engineer to get out and change a flow tap to see how hard it is. It makes him think twice when designing a system.”
Dan Rafter is a technical writer based in Chesterton, IN.
OW - January/February 2007 |
