24:52 – 27:28

AS: I think I started when I was like 30 or somewhere around there. So, if I would have started when I was 22, then my wage would be so much higher now or to have all of these certs.

One thing I would say is the hardest -- trying to balance work-life and you have a treatment 3 tests or a wastewater test, and you're like, "I haven't been in college in 18 years…"

For me, my frame of studying isn't there anymore, like I have to completely consume a day or like for some of my tests, I studied for like three months where I would get up at like 5:00 AM, study for two hours before work because I knew that I'm not going to have any time to actually try to cram -- my brain doesn't allow me to cram it like I did in college.

EE: And the tests are pretty hard?

AS: And then with that, Bolinas is such a small infrastructure and everything, whereas very simply, when you're doing water math, it's in like million gallons but like, yesterday we produced 70,000 gallons.

So the test encompasses everything possible as if you're in like San Francisco or a huge district. You have to -- all the material is still relevant but then for our little district, there's things that we've never seen, we'll never use.

Like on the wastewater side, we just have a gravity sewer system that goes to a force main which shoots it up to our ponds and then it just cycles through four ponds. And then, from April 15th to November 15th, we can spray it.

There's really nothing else we do, but to pass that test, you have to understand how to work a 50,000,000 gallon-a-day wastewater plant with everything that – I really have to watch a video or something I'll never actually be around without going out of my way.

EE: But they're trying to cover all the bases…

AS: Yeah, so it makes sense. But you can't be like, "Well, I'm not gonna, that's not gonna be at my work."

17:43 – 26:40 (25:50) 

AO: It feels good for me to know I'm part of that, that we're building a wastewater treatment facility, upgrading all the infrastructure, and helping the guys that are here. With my knowledge to help them excel in their field right now, to help them, encourage them to get their certification. Most of the guys didn't have no certification coming in here.  

EE: How many people work here?  

AO: I can't think of one that has certification, only one certified. That's the reason they hired me. Oh no, our water transmission, our water operator, distribution operator has a level 3 in distribution. He's the only other guy that was certified beside me. Then we got our director from Cochiti — he came from Los Alamos, same place I used to work; I didn't know him though, but he knows a lot of people I knew. He has a certification also. And then just recently, one of our refuge truck drivers, CDL drivers, got his treatment too, Southwest Environmental Finance. He got his distribution 1 and his treatment 2 just a couple weeks ago. So we're really happy with them. We had other guys test, of course, they didn't pass, but we're telling them not to give up. Keep helping with the best way we can, you know? So bring in trainers or, you know...  

EE: How many people are on the team?  

OA: We have a total of 12 now. We have an engineer they hired last year — I don't think they've ever had a water and wastewater engineer. Then we hired an OIT just recently... There's a problem with finding operators. A lot of operators have already retired two times, they're on their 3rd career with being a water and wastewater operator, because it's a shortage, right? And what I learned in California is that they help recruit people, they started operator-in-training. I got that idea when I came back, because I was seeing the same situation in New Mexico. At Sandia, I was able to convince them to start a program for operator-in-training, and they were the first in the state of New Mexico to advertise.  

EE: Does that mean on-the-job training?  

OA: Yes, on-the-job training. They were the first In New Mexico to post an OIT position for water and wastewater — I bought that idea from California. That was back in 2021, I think. And with that program  — we had a custodian that went through that program as an OIT, got his certification within 18 months, got double level 1s, we hired him and kept him on. Another guy was with farm services and he joined us in OIT, got his double level 1s. And then we hired some young people from outside of the tribe. They came in from a different pueblo and we hired them as OITS and they went on to get the certification also. So then I came over here and I brought that over here. We were having problems. I said, let'sdo an OIT and then they came up with their own job description for it. I know now the State of New Mexico, got that OIT in their language. I think they saw it off of us and then they made something with the state as far as OIT level 1, 2, 3, and 4.  

EE: Is it a good job?  

OA: It's a lot of meetings. My whole schedule is nothing but meetings. Once in a while, when I get free time, I go out in the field and try to check up on the guys, help them if I can. I'm the only wastewater operator. Well, actually, the director's got a level 2, but he's busy doing all that other stuff. So I go and take care of the lagoons and monitor the lift stations, stuff like that. I'll go out and build and help, wherever I can. Time permitting, if I don't have a meeting or something.  

EE: It sounds like whenever you decide to retire, you might have people who are in place to take over…?  

AO: Well, that was my whole idea! My goal coming here was to get as many people as I could certified before I left, so that when I retire, they'll be taking over that plant. There'll be operators. We're on the good path of getting these guys, keep working with them to get trained, and to hire more certified operators. Right now we're working with New Mexico Rural Water Apprenticeship Program. So we've recommended two of our W9 workers — W9 workers are temporary workers that we use for feast days or if we need them to do stuff around here, they're not full time. So we've had residents that we've helped out that way — that helped us out and we've recommended them to sign up for this program. We're currently trying to get them hired on as OITs through the apprenticeship program. Once they get their certification, then we'll hire them full-time.  

EE: So if somebody's kind of on the fence or thinking about this as a career path, what would you say to convince them?  

OA: I would say that the certification that you obtain is yours. It's a professional certification that you can reciprocate throughout the whole United States. So, if you have a level 4 in New Mexico, California will give you a level 4 straight across. Some states will drop you one or two levels; they'll still reciprocate it. The same way they treat waste water and water here in New Mexico, they do the same thing in Germany, in Japan. Language is different. Technologies are the same. You know, MBRs, SBRs, activated sludge, nitrogen rule — it’s all the same. The process is universal. There's a language barrier, but if they sent me to Kuwait to go look at one of their plants and I didn't understand, I could operate it because I would know what to do. If I had the equipment, I would know what to look for and know how to take care of everything. That never changes, no matter where you are. This career, you can work anywhere. You can do anything.  

13:06 – 20:36 

BP: We had conventional water treatment -- sand and gravel filters -- for years. They weren't able to meet our water quality results for the state so we were in violation. For 15 years, the district tried all sorts of methods to fix the problem. We were very fortunate at that point in time; the state of California was very understanding with the problems of small districts and instead of fining us, they allowed us to take that money -- maybe it was their policy, I'm not quite sure, but from where I was sitting, it was a blessing -- they let us reinvest that money into trying to solve the problem. Then a company came out of Australia called MEM Corps. They came up with these microfiltration units, which are very much like a kidney dialysis unit, but, you know, theory is the same, but the filtration is different, same, but different. That was able to pull all particulates up to one micron out of the water, which is huge. We went and looked at it; we brought it to the board. We've always had a great board of directors here at the district. They're all local community members; they were elected. They receive just a little money for what they do, and they're great. They've always been great. They'vebeen community based. They've been very fair to employees. It's been a great place to work because the board always takes the community's interest and the employees' interest and treat it the same. That being said, they went off the deep end of the pool and went for this new technology which was a major investment -- a couple million-dollar investment-- and we put in a micro-filtration plant. It was only the third one in the state of California.  

EE: Oh, wow. And you had a hand in doing that? 

BP: We were all involved in it. They built the plant and it's been in operation ever since. It's had changes done to it, tweaks here and there, and it really made the job a lot easier. The technology was completely different. The biggest learning curve was getting over the fact that it was different. One day we were using something we were very comfortable with, and the next day, there was this automated technological thing, which I am not very versed in -- that's not my world, but it's still the same thing -- the water comes in; it goes through different valves and different processes through a filter and comes out the other end. 

EE: Did you have to seek extra training or how did you learn? 

BP: You get trained when they bring it in, and we were very fortunate to have a technician who started the plant up, and then he opened his own business and we worked very closely with him every time he'd come out two or three times a year. He would come out and we'd have staff training. When he came out, he was always available when we had initial problems we couldn't deal with because we didn't know what was going on. Now it's a completely different animal. My generation is no longer running it. The younger generation -- Stu, Andrew, Evan and Sean -- they're all in their 30s, and it's not foreign to them. Their new ideas are great. The plant's even better off with the new generation of operators. So that's all worked out really well. 

The original wastewater in Bolinas was just, and still is, the downtown -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 hookups or so. A gravity system, it all flowed downtown to a giant manhole which had a pipe that went out into the channel, into the lagoon. That was the wastewater system in Bolinas from the early 1900s. Then the Clean Water Act passed and when the Clean Water Act was put in, one of the goals was to stop that. It was going on all over the country -- open ocean or river dumping of raw sewage. So, there was a plan put together that would build a 20 million gallon-a-day sewage treatment plant here in Bolinas. It called for the development of the Bolinas Lagoon -- to put in hotels and marinas, to have Stinson Beach developed to a population of over 100,000 people here in Stinson and Bolinas. It would be much like Santa Cruz. That brought up a giant uproar, of course. That was a battle, which was part of the water battle...  

EE: That was in the early ‘70s? 

BP: That was in the ‘70s and that prevailed. As a result, that plan was shelved and never went into effect but the federal government had already funded the sewer treatment plant. So, the board of directors at the time were a bunch of great people. They somehow connected up with Dr. Oswald--I believe he was at UC Berkeley --and he had his own idea on a sewage treatment plant which was a very passive pond system and was put into Bolinas. I can't believe the federal government funded this because it was from left field, but we still use it. It works great. It's operator friendly and it requires no chemicals. It services the existing downtown sewage area, the area that was ocean outfall. All of that now goes to that same area where it went before, but now there is a lift station, a sewage pump station, and it's pumped up to spray fields and the ponds, which is across from the firehouse. You would never know what it is; it looks like a field with ponds and full of birds. It's a great thing, and that was the first one put in the state. Now there's several. It's a great way to treat sewage. It requires a lot of land-- that's why it's not used widely. So that was the sewage treatment. Being able to do water and sewer here --a small crew can handle it because the wastewater disposal system is so simple. It is very simple. 

33:44 – 36:38 

EE: Can you tell a story or two -- I'm sure you have many -- about a problem that you worked hard to fix?  

BP: I don't know if you work hard to fix a problem. I think you just fix the problem. You know, 

EE: What’s the difference?  

BP: A problem you can't solve, you have to work hard at. I think that my experience has been here. Everybody that'sworked here is -- this wasn't their goal job. They've done many other things beforehand. I did many things before I started working here. When we're hiring people, they've never done this before. Very rarely have we hired somebody who had a treatment operator's license or any license at all. They've done tree work, worked as an apprentice for plumbers, they're carpenters, truck drivers, equipment operators, gardeners, landscapers, that kind of stuff -- blue collar work.  

EE: Hands on.  

BP: Hands on. So when a problem comes up, something that needs to be fixed, they already know how to fix it. They don't know -- I didn't know how to fix it -- but when I looked at it, I go, “if you do this and you do that, you can fix it.” That pipe I was talking about, the steam pipe, the 1.9 diameter pipe. An inch and a half pipe fitting is too small. A two-inch pipe fitting is too big. In order to fix a broken piece of pipe, you have to splice in another pipe. To do that, you would take two fittings. One would go over the old pipe and put the new piece of pipe in it and the same at the other end. So how do you do that when the fittings don't work? Well, Mike Aitkens had a shop downtown -- he's an auto restorer in a little machine shop -- we would take an inch and a half dresser coupling down to Mike and he’d put it on his metal lathe and take the metal flange and bore it out to the right diameter. Then we would be able to put that on a piece of inch and a half schedule 80 pipe . He'd be able to splice it in, so there's… 

EE: So, each one was custom made.  

BP: You have to take an existing fitting and adapt it to work. That happens in the field all the time with everything.  

EE: The custom fix.  

BP: The custom fix. I see it all the time.  

37:03.64 - 43:13.14 

With the town of Silver, that's different, I've had a number of big items that have happened there. Everything from we had, we've had lightning strike, a major pumping system that took out our entire control panel.  

EE: Wow.   

EM: All controls for the building were basically, non-operational, they would have had to been replaced. And so, it was in the middle of summer, when water use is extremely high, and our system, like I said, is leapfrog, so we have the wells, well fields pumping into one set of tanks from there, gravity fed to another set of tanks which then boosts to our middle set, W Mountain, which then boosts to another set of tanks in PA. And right in the middle, which is our swan street, that's what got struck by lightning, I literally knew I was on the clock, I had two days to find a way to start pumping water up to the, the tanks, or else I was gonna have a major issue for all the northern side of town, as well as the community of Pinos Altos, which is a small town, just north of Silver City, which gets water from Silver. That was, that was pretty nerve-racking once we found out how much damage was done. We were able to test our well or our motors on our boosters,those were fine, thank goodness. We were like, great, we were.  

EE: How soon did you know that it was out?  

EM: Luckily, we had automation there, so it notified us the moment that struck, that strike happened, we were out there. We got there, we saw the damage and there was no, you couldn't miss it. The boxes were blown up, literally.  

EE: Wow, like black.  

EM: Yes, black.  

EE: Exploded.  

EM: Yes, completely, what we didn't know at the time was, it had also created an issue that the transformers for the power company. Under no load, it would show a regular voltage of four hundred and eighty, but the moment you put a load to it, it would go to full load amps, like 17,000 volts. Yeah, they didn't know that at the time, but we were still trying to figure out what do we do? We can't, we can't order a control panel immediately. If so, it was so specialized that it was going to take us weeks, we had two days. We realized, okay, so we had a certain size of motor there, which was a hundred horse motor and like I spoke before, we had just bought, we had just upgraded our well fields with new motors and new control panels. So we decided we were going to go to one of the wells that was least in rotation, and we basically, which was a hundred horse motor, and we completely took all of the electrical components out, the entire box, put it in our truck, and drove it to the pump station, and begin helping the electrician wire it in.    

EE: Wow, good thinking.  

EM: Yeah, that was the only thing we could think of to get us water within twenty-four hours. 

EE: And then did you have to order a new panel?  

EM: Yes.  

EE: That still took a few weeks to...    

EM: Yeah, actually, because it, you know, it was a lightning strike. It was one of those insurance policy type things, so it did take some time, but we were able to replace those. While that was being done, we had our temporary fix, so, it worked out great. We were able to have that system up and running within the day. I think it took us a day to get everything taken care of. It wasn't on our side what ended up happening was once we got our control box wired in, werealized that there was something wrong with the incoming power as our box would shut off and then the power meter would blow up. Which PNM, our power company, saw that, realized, and had to bring in, they too, they don't necessarily have transformers just laying around. Luckily, they were able to get a new set of transformers in, that was our biggest concern was the wait, but we got that in and we were back in operation within a day and a half; thanks, no one knew, no one knew what had happened, no one knew.  

EE: I was gonna ask if any, if the community was aware, no?  

EM: No.  

EE: Wow.  

EM: They had no idea.    

EE: What's that like having a job that's so important but so invisible?   

EM: I don't mind it, to me, it was nice. I knew that, it's important, a lot of people don't realize how important it is until you don't have water.    

EE: Right.    

EM: You know, it's something that's required for everything. I take, I took pride again, it's my system, if I'm the operator, if my name's on that thing, I want to make sure that everything's on par. My biggest thing on that north side is the dialysis clinic and the hospital, both receive water from the north end, so that was my biggest concern was how many people were not going to be getting service through the dialysis clinic or the hospital, you know, being without water. We also were looking at how we could change and which we did, during that time we were looking at water. It would have been a lower pressure water; some water to the hospital, but it's nice, I don't mind being invisible.