Former Plant Supt. Pat Wood made the move to his new position with Sweet Home Public Works for the challenge.
Wood started working as maintenance superintendent on Sept. 18.
Wood was the city’s water and wastewater plant superintendent. He succeeds Dale Ivan, who moved to California earlier this year, as maintenance superintendent. The new job pays the same and it’s similar to the position he had held.
When Ivan resigned, Wood was acting superintendent, sharing Ivan’s responsibilities with Public Works Director Mike Adams.
“I’ve always been aware of all the problems that the maintenance department has had to deal with,” Wood said. With the working conditions and compensation being equal between his old position and the new one, “the truth is there’s some big challenges over here.”
Of course, the water and wastewater treatment plants have their own big problems, Wood said, but he knew them well and was comfortable with dealing with them. Responsibility for the biggest problems, for which the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has fined the City of Sweet Home in the past, are not solvable at the plants.
That problem is inflow and infiltration (I&I) into the city’s sewer system. The problem is storm water leaking into the sewer system during heavy rain either through cross connections or through cracks. The city produces about 1 million gallons of water per day and would expect about 1 million gallons per day to come back to the wastewater treatment plant. The result of I&I is that the city gets back 12 million gallons of mostly rainwater in heavy rain.
“You always had an excuse,” Wood said. “You’ve got a six-million gallon plant and you send 12 million gallons to it. What can I do about it?”
On the maintenance side, “I think it’d be very challenging,” Wood said. “I’ve seen how people in the past have done this job. I think I can do better.”
With his background moving place to place every month falling timber, “I get bored,” Wood said. “I’ve been down there in the (plants) for seven years.”
It’s also “a little but of being where the action is,” Wood said. Staff would talk about different problems around the city, but being at the plants all the time, Wood could never get there to see what it is they were talking about.
Wood likes to good things for people, he said. He has an excellent working relationship with the department director, and he thinks he “can make a difference.”
“I think we have a good crew here,” Wood said. The crew needs to be turned loose “to use their abilities more.”
That means Wood expects crew members to already know what to do when work needs to be done, and he doesn’t want crew members waiting for him to tell them to do it.
“These guys have been working for a couple of months without a supervisor,” Wood said. “They’re doing excellent.”
Wood prides himself on being realistic and doesn’t want to sound too idealistic, and though the city’s sewer pipes are a huge problem, he does have a plan for getting at the problem.
“I think in the past it’s been looked at as overwhelming, ‘so we’re not going to do anything about it,’” Wood said. In 1981, he believes, a report showed there were some $12 million in repairs needed in the sewer system. With inflation, that’s $20 million now plus what has happened in the sewer system over the last 20 years.
“Here’s this huge, huge problem, and it’s so huge we can be excused from it,” Wood said. If it needs to be fixed, “gimme $20 million. I don’t believe that at all. There’s lots we can do.”
There are piles of information on sewer conditions all around the city based on smoke tests and other sources, he said, but there’s so much of it, “you can’t see the picture.”
So he put the maps on the wall, he said. “We’ve got to make a plan and actually go after it.”
Latching onto the cliché about the 1,000-mile journey beginning with the first step, he wants his crew to take the first step against this problem.
The city has committed to DEQ to providing $50,000 per year to combating I&I problems, Wood said, but one block of sewer lines costs $30,000 on average and the city has 85 miles of sewer lines.
With a plan of attack in hand, getting the most “bang for the buck,” then his department can approach the city council for a funding source, he said. For his crew, that means going to work detailing the I&I problems and grouting a basin at a time. Right now, they’re working in basin one near the Elks Lodge. The city has 15 basins.
The biggest challenge there is that he has only two persons working in the sewer system, he said. Last year, a water-wastewater rate study showed that the city needed at least one more to maintain, not improving, what it has on the sewer side. The same went for the water system.
“I’ll get the job done,” Wood said of the work in general. “I’ll see that it gets done or there’ll be a definite ‘know why.’”
If it’s fix the I&I problem, it needs money, but he’ll put together a plan for solving it.
Wood grew up in Brownsville. He worked for Willamette Industries for 17 years, 13 years falling timber. When the timber industry declined in the early 1990s, Wood was let go. He got into a dislocated timber worker program at Linn-Benton Community College in water-wastewater course. He did his cooperative work experience in Sweet Home over the summer. He was hired after his second year in school as an operator. When Al Cates retired four years ago, Wood was hired as the plant superintendent. He has been with the city for about seven years.