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Katie:
Welcome to another City of Reading podcast. We bet you don't think very much about what happens after you flush the toilet and why would you? Right. It's a modern convenience that we can easily take for granted.

Steve:
One of the reasons you don't have to think about it is because there's a whole team of people working behind the scenes to make sure what you flush down a drain or toilet goes back to the Sacramento River as clean or cleaner than when it came out.

Katie:
Today we talk with George Kaufman, Stillwater Wastewater Treatment Plant Supervisor and head of the award winning 2021 California State Wastewater Treatment Plant of the Year. That's a big deal for reading. George gives us a fascinating look into how science can turn your number two into a number one resource water, that is.

Steve:
But don't worry, there's not much of a growth factor in this episode, but it might just open your eyes to how important it is to take care of our natural resources and be a responsible community member. This is known in the wastewater world as someone who doesn't flush things down the toilet. They gum up the system. We're looking at you flushable wipes with that. We'll let George take it from here.

George Coughran:
My name is George Coughran and my title is Public Works Supervisor for the Stillwater Wastewater Treatment Plant. I've been working for the city of Redding for about 12 years now. And in wastewater, municipal wastewater treatment for the last 13 and a half years, I've lived in the North State since 1989, and I love the North State, I love Redding. I love all of the north state has to offer.

Katie:
Well, thank you for being with us here today. I think what we primarily want to talk about is all things wastewater. And the Stillwater Wastewater Treatment Plant was recently named as a best small wastewater treatment plant in the state of California. So we definitely want to touch on that. But maybe to begin, you can just give us an overview on on what wastewater is.

George Coughran:
Well, wastewater is the polluted form of water generated from different sources. One is even from rainwater runoff. But primarily what we're talking about here is human activities. And I like to call it wastewater. Back in the day, people would refer to it more so as sewage. But wastewater treatment is the removal of impurities from the wastewater before it reaches natural bodies of water like rivers, lakes and oceans. So in broad terms, water is said to be polluted when it contains enough impurities to make it unfit for particular use, like drinking water, swimming, recreational water, fishing. And although water quality can be affected by natural conditions, the word when you think of pollution, it really implies human activity, like I was mentioning a moment ago, as the source of contamination. So it's caused primarily by the drainage of contaminated wastewater into the surface water or groundwater and wastewater treatment is how we control that water pollution and take care of it. There's three types of wastewater that are commonly known, and that's domestic wastewater. Industrial wastewater and storm wastewater. And domestic wastewater carries the water from our homes and apartments. It's also called sanitary sewage industrial wastewater that would be coming from manufacturing companies or manufacturers or chemical processes, like there's some industrial aluminum manufacture for airplanes, and that creates wastewater that also comes to the wastewater treatment plant. And then there's storm water runoff and companies that have a lot of maybe they have a large fleet of trucks or something like that.

George Coughran:
And there's oil that leaks from those trucks and that goes into a collection system that could potentially come to the wastewater treatment plant. So the Stillwater plant deals with all three domestic, industrial and runoff water. All of that can come to this plant, but primarily it's domestic wastewater. That domestic wastewater is about 99.9% water by weight. And what that means is, though, is that it's got mostly water, but just a small amount of dissolved impurities in suspended solids. But the problem is those things are very toxic and those impurities include organic materials that plants need to grow, like nitrogen and phosphorus. And if we don't remove the nitrogen, we do something called nitrification at our plant, and that is the removal of nitrogen, which if we were to allow that to get into the river, it would cause algae blooms because that's a that's a plant food. And the algae in that water would grow like crazy. And then the algae would use up oxygen and the fish wouldn't get enough oxygen and they would die. But the biggest thing for us is disease causing microorganisms. A few that come to mind are E coli, encephalitis, jihadists, hepatitis A, cholera, even typhoid fever. But there's many more. So without wastewater treatment and the removal of those disease causing bacteria, civilization really wouldn't be possible or be able to exist in large populated areas.

Steve:
So that's great. That's really actually fascinating. I had a question with regard to so I understand all the water that goes to the wastewater treatment plant gets treated and then gets released out into the Sacramento River as opposed to getting put back into the community and houses and whatnot. So I guess kind of a two part question for those folks at home. Does the water from their sinks and their toilets all go through the wastewater treatment plant. And then I guess the follow up is with that water, then then gets treated, the plant released into the river. How common is that structure and method, I guess both here in California and across the country versus water being treated and being put back into the community?

George Coughran:
Well, in many places in southern California, they'll take water and put it back into the community in the form of reclaimed water. And what that means is the wastewater that's come into the plant and been treated with the various processes within the plant would normally go to a discharge point. In the case of the Stillwater plant, it goes back into the Sacramento River now at the Stillwater plant and other plants. Also, they'll take some of that water and divert some of it off and use it to water golf courses sometimes along the highway, like if you drive down to Red Bluff, you'll see purple signs. And purple signs are an indicator that that water came from a wastewater treatment plant. And it's water that's used to water lawns along the side of the roads on I-5, going south around Red Bluff. It's watering bushes along there. Of course, you wouldn't want to drink that water. And at this plant, we actually have a ranch that's adjacent to the plant, and some of our water is sold to a rancher. That water is ranch ground. So the good part about it is we're reusing that water for it just goes into the Sacramento River and it's called reclaimed water. And more and more water is being used. It's coming out of wastewater treatment plants and being treated for other means and other needs. In Southern California, it's even being sent right to some water treatment plants and being treated there at the water treatment plants and put back into the distribution system that's going into people's homes. So the wastewater is being literally treated and reused because of the water shortages, which a lot of people are. There's a there's a pretty good yuck factor there. But the water treatment people and the wastewater treatment people really do a good job and they wouldn't be distributing the water if it wasn't safe.

Steve:
I guess it brings up a follow up question. You touched on the Southern California water shortage. Obviously, we're currently in stage two of our drought contingency plan up here in Shasta County and Redding. Is there a feasibility of at some point in time bringing more of that treated water back into the system for not just golf course and highway watering, but also landscaping for community members?

George Coughran:
Well, the two wastewater treatment plants that we have within the city of Redding, there's the Clear Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is a much larger plant than ours. And our plant are both our outfalls are adjacent to the Sacramento Rivers. The proximity to our outfall and being able to pipe that water back into the city at this point would be so expensive that it's really not a good option economically. We really don't need to try to retrieve the water coming out of the plants to the same level as we would if we live down in the desert of Southern California where they don't have an aquifer underneath them. So they're looking at ways to get get that water and reuse it, clean it up and use it. I don't think that we'll see the city trying to spend a lot of money to recover that water when we have so much other water available to us. Even though Shasta Dam's low, the aquifer underneath us is healthy.

Katie:
That's good news. I wanted to maybe back up a little bit and do a high level kind of summation so you're at home and on the water from your sinks and from your toilets. So anything you flush and anything that goes down your sink eventually finds its way to a wastewater treatment plant. And then it goes through its processing, and then it goes for us here in Redding. It goes out to the Sacramento River. And some people might think that that's gross or not environmentally friendly. How do you ensure that the water that's going back out to the river is 100% clean for the wildlife and the environment?

George Coughran:
Well, part of it is through good design of the wastewater treatment plant itself and the people that design the plants and understand them working in conjunction with the people operating them. Over the course of centuries, we've learned what's effective and how to treat the wastewater so that we know that what's coming out the other end through tried and true practices is clean water. And the second way is we're highly regulated. We've got the federal government through the EPA, State Water Resources Control Board, not to mention other other regulators, safety related like Cal OSHA and air related, like the Shasta County Air Quality Control Board, Fish and Wildlife Monitoring what we're doing. And we have a permit through the State Water Resources Control Board that lays out what our limits are and what we're allowed to put into the water. And we can tell what we're putting into the water because we have a complete certified lab that the city owns that does most of our testing. And on a daily basis, we have testing that's going on, that's required testing. It really lays it out quite well, what we're required to sample for and what our limits are in the water that's going into the river. We're constantly testing that to make sure that it meets those specifications lined out in our permit.

George Coughran:
And if we don't meet those specifications, then we will be fined. And so, you know, both wastewater treatment plants within the city of running do an awesome job maintaining the regulatory requirements of our permits. We have people that we actually. Have an individual that works for us, Rob Marvin, who is a permit specialist. He's helping us as the chief plant operator of my plant and Troy Mitchell as the chief plant operator of his plant. We're responsible to write all of the monthly, quarterly, annual reports to the state, and it's just very highly regulated. So we don't have a lot of latitude as far as what we can deviate from regarding these permits. Each plant's given its own permit. All of the permits are not the same, and it's our job here to serve as operators and my job as the chief plant operator to know the permits and make sure that the permit is being executed and that we're living within those limitations. And our goal is to produce the cleanest water we can into the river. And we do a very good job. And that's one of the reasons why we were recognized as the state plant of the year for small plants.

Steve:
Thank you, George. Absolutely. So you mentioned that this really is a seven day a week, 365 day a year process. How does what we do here in Redding compare to other similar sized cities in California?

George Coughran:
Well, almost all the wastewater treatment plants, they never stop operating. I shouldn't say almost all, but wastewater treatment plants, basically, the water keeps coming in. It doesn't stop coming in. So they're all receiving water and discharging water or some of it goes to land application. But the water as a whole, especially in larger communities, it's coming in and it's being treated and it's going out. Some of the larger plants or both of our plants here in Redding are staff seven days a week, 365 days a year. And we have smaller staff to make sure that everything is taken care of and manning the plant literally every day of the year, there's someone here. How do you compare that with other plants? Very similar. You know, you've got staffing for the most part, especially in larger cities like Redding. There's going to be someone there every day. There's also going to be people on call. If the plant is not staffed 24 hours around the clock, operators leaves and there's a computer system that works in conjunction with phone system. And when an alarm goes off from our monitoring system, it'll call the operator that's on call and he'll have to come out and determine what the problem is and hopefully be able to solve the problem and go back home at Stillwater and Clear Creek wastewater treatment plants are operators do not work around the clock. They work a day shift. And then our operator, whoever the designated operator is that week that's on call has to be ready to take call outs from the time that he leaves work until the time he comes back in in the morning. He's responsible for any issues at the plant.

Katie:
I'm actually curious how often do alarms happen? How often does something pop up that someone has to take care of? And then maybe a second part to that question is what what kind of things do you find when alarms go off?

George Coughran:
Well, the frequency of alarms this time of year, when there's no rain is much less. And the rain actually affects the flows as the rain. We haven't had good rainy seasons, unfortunately, for a while. In the wintertime, when it rains a lot, the flows to the plant actually increase. And the reason for that is the ground gets saturated with water and it enters into those collection system pipelines and that water ends up coming to us because that collection system is going to the wastewater treatment plant. So our flows will increase over the years. I want to say the city worked very hard and they're successfully improving the poor sections. Each year the city spends millions of dollars improving old sections of the collection system and patching and improving and re piping and lining. And last year our collection system team was also the recipient of a state award. We thought we really thought they would win, number one. And I think they should have personally. They had cleaned all 420 plus miles of pipeline within the city. They actually scope it. It means they put like a remote car of sorts down in there that goes in and looks and inspects everything and anything that they find that needs to be cleaned or repaired. They do that. And that's an amazing, amazing accomplishment for 120 miles in one year. So they came in second in the state for collection systems, which was pretty amazing to me. But anyway, the water comes through the plants, through the collection system in the rainy season is when at the still water treatment plant, we can treat up to 14 million gallons a day, but we might have more than that coming in if it's really raining and we'll only allow the 14 million to come into the plant and then we'll trim the rest of it into a storage pond and a clear creek.

George Coughran:
It's a similar system. They can treat 20 to 21 million gallons a day. But I worked there before here and I've seen up to 60 million arriving through the collection system at the plant. And they also have to trim all that extra water off into storm holding ponds. And then when the storms recede, they bring that in. So do we. We bring the water back in at that time. But it's at that time of year when we're having those high flows that we get more alarms in the dry season like we're having right now. There's very few. It gets very steady and everything's really smooth as far as the flows go. And so you don't tend to have very many call outs this time of year. We have sensors monitoring the water and the sensors and analyzers monitoring the water for chlorine, for sulfur dioxide or. High or low. So our analyzers are all analyzing the water through probes and meters. And so we have safety features that are built through these analyzers into our computer system, which is tied to our call out system. And the operators get called out for maybe high or low and a variety of things like that. There's really not all that many call outs. As far as I'm guesstimating here. I'd say your chances of getting called 20% or lower, but you have to have that phone right by the bed there just in case and be ready.

Steve:
George, I'm curious. We we hear a lot in the community about not flushing wipes down down the toilet, not putting grease down your drains when it's time to drain a swimming pool, putting it down your pipes versus in the storm drain, which obviously puts a lot of chemicals down the pipes. How do things like that, maybe not so much the chlorine from the pool, but specifically like grease and wipes and other things maybe shouldn't necessarily go down the toilet or elsewhere. How do those negatively impact treatment plans?

George Coughran:
Well, with the wipes, what happens is, although they say that they're flushable, they don't disintegrate within the flow stream. So when they arrive at the plant, they come to the plants. They're designed a little bit differently. But when it comes to the plant, they're coming to either pumps or screens. And the pumps can get rigged up with big rag balls where the operators have to take out pumps that weigh thousands of pounds with a crane and try to get the rag ball out from underneath the pump where it's been sucked into it. It's not there. Safety issues. We start talking about doing that and it's not something that's enjoyable. They're fun to do, but let's say it makes it past the pump. Then it's going to be going up to a screen that's an automated screen, and the screens have tens of thousands of holes in them that are about a quarter of an inch in diameter. And so the water can go through this screen holes and they're designed to pick up anything larger than the size of the hole. Well, those flushable wipes that don't disintegrate in the water, they get caught on that rack and they build up on there and they can bend been some portions of the screen and ruin them as they bind and go around. They can create what we as operators call logs, rag logs in front of the screens.

George Coughran:
And if they make it past that, then they go into a clarifier where those pumps that pump off the bottom of the clarifier, they get dragged up. It's kind of a domino effect downstream. It just creates a lot of work and a lot of problems and repairs and issues on the machinery and extra work for the operators and mechanics and everyone. So people flush toys and all kinds of things. We even received sheets from the jail, if you can believe that, at the Clear Creek plant. As far as the grease goes around Thanksgiving, a lot of people make turkeys and they'll dump their grease down from cooking. Well, that's just like cholesterol in your veins. It builds up in the pipes and the pipes get clogged off and they have grease bergs. You think of icebergs instead of it's a great spurt and it just it gets in those pipes and hardens up and slowly constricts the flow of the pipe down more and more. And then the pipe can't function normally. And then it hits the pumps. If it makes it down a ways when they're cleaning, it has the domino effect again downstream and then chemicals. You mentioned pools, any chemical that can come into the collection system, one of the key components of a wastewater treatment plant is biological treatment.

George Coughran:
And in an iteration base, and we have something in there called mixed liquor and mix. Liquor is basically a live biological base and full of microbial bacteria that does a lot of the work for us is operators in that it breaks down the pollutants within the water and it's the microbiology is alive. They're live. There's billions of them. They need food, which is the waste that is coming from people's homes, the domestic waste, that's their food. And they breathe and they eat and they reproduce and they remove the pollutants. They they remove through nitrification the ammonia that I mentioned earlier. And they're a huge component in treating the water. So if we have someone that's dumping toxic chemicals or metals or anything like that into the collection system, and it's coming to to those microorganisms, if those microorganisms get killed, we can't treat the water and we can't meet our permit. So we actually have within the city of Redding an industrial waste department. They look out for us. They protect us as operators at both plants. They're monitoring all discharges of industrial wastewater. They're monitoring restaurants primarily because of the grease and oils. But anyone that can affect the wastewater treatment plants, biology, they're on top of it.

Steve:
George touched on earlier how in a previous career you were a school teacher and athletic director. I'm guessing that's not the normal transition into a wastewater career. How does someone start a career in wastewater treatment?

George Coughran:
Well, a lot of people that are in wastewater treatment, I don't know that there's very many people that in high school say, you know what, I would just love to be a wastewater treatment operator. That's my lifetime goal. I'd say that kind of tongue in cheek. But it seems like most of the people that are in wastewater treatment, they came here from different they tried something else first and maybe they tried two or three or four different things first and then. Discovered that it exists and became interested in it at that. I don't know what leads them to that point. A lot of times it's a friend, it's a relative. It's someone that's been in wastewater treatment that's suggesting it and recommending it. And when someone becomes interested in it, there's a couple of different pathways. One of them, we're very fortunate right here in Redding at Shasta College, there's wastewater treatment classes and you can go it's a three semester program. And over the three semester, three semesters, you would basically be having a beginning, a middle and an advanced class. And you come out of that with a certificate in wastewater treatment. You've gotten the basic training that you need, in other words. And they also have water treatment, by the way. And they've over the years, they've done a wonderful job. Most people that go up there take both wastewater treatment and water treatment.

George Coughran:
And once a person graduates from those classes and you have those certificates in wastewater, what you need to do is secure a position as a wastewater treatment operator and training. And that's a what that means is you're going to be employed by a treatment plant as as a trainee for 12 months. And after 12 months, if you've passed a certification, grade one certification or grade two certification exam, then you can become a certified operator. The challenge trying to go into this is an operator and training position can be difficult to get. Personally, I had to go down to Southern California to secure the operator in training position and then I was able to return back home and work for the city. That's the hardest component in my opinion for wastewater is finding that operator and training position because you can pass certification tests, you can take the classes at the college, you can be really good and learn a lot. But if you can't get that component of that requirement, I should say, by the state of California, of the 12 months of training and you can't become a certified operator and water treatment, they you can become certified after passing your grade one test. But in wastewater, you have to have the 12 months to become certified. So it's it's a great career. I highly recommend it.

Katie:
George, now that we've had a conversation, we've talked a little bit about what wastewater is and the science aspects that go into that and how wastewater treatment plants work and the employment. And you obviously have a great crew out there. So the Stillwater Wastewater Treatment Plant just won the distinction of being named the best small wastewater treatment plant in the entire state of California. How how did you win that award? How did reading when that award what what do they look for when they're looking for the best wastewater treatment plant?

George Coughran:
Well, in my opinion, we won the award because of the people that we have here. You know, it's the different components all coming together, working together as a team. And what I mean by components, I mean our operators, our lab techs, our electrical techs, our industrial waste techs. We have a safety specialist, we have mechanics. I have people supporting me up above my head that give me the things I need to be able to do what I need to do. We have the common goal of excelling, working as a team, having one another's backs, trying to put the best quality effluent we can into the river, showing pride in the facility. So the the way that it works is there's there's 18 of these sections within the California Water Association. We're in the northern section. And every year within those sections you can apply for Plant of the Year. And it was a very lengthy application. The local section will send out a group of people from other wastewater treatment plants that are usually chief plant operators or in a leadership position of some kind. And they'll come out and ask a questions and inspect your plant, and then they'll make a decision on the local level. And if you win the local level, then you're automatically put into the competition against the other 18 or so sections within the state.

George Coughran:
For the state award, by the way, there's large plants, medium plants and small plant categories. We at this plant fall into the small plant category, and the Clear Creek plant is the medium plant category and they want plant of the year in the local section as we did. So that's something to be proud of for both of our I mentioned the collection system earlier and then both the Clear Creek plant and the Stillwater plant both won plant of the year at the local level a month and a half. Two months later, I received a phone call from a gentleman from the CW, California Water Environmental Association, CWA, that said he was the chair of the Leadership Committee and that we were being considered for state plan to the year at the small plant level. And they would like to schedule three people from Southern California to come up to interview our staff and to tour our plant. And they came up and they spent 4 hours here that day. And and then they said, we're very impressed. Thank you very much. And left. And about a month later, we were notified that we won state state plant of the year. That was pretty unexpected and exciting.

Katie:
Well, congratulations, because it's I mean, whether people realize it or not, wastewater is extremely important. But I think it's often ignored. Right, because you flush your toilet and you forget about what happens. I guess this goes into my silly question for you, George, which is if the apocalypse happened in wastewater treatment, plants everywhere just stopped. How long would it be until the community really, really felt the impact of that?

George Coughran:
Well, it would. If you lived out in Montana in the middle of nowhere or Alaska, it wouldn't affect you all that much. But whenever you get into areas where there's a lot of people, it's going to affect them pretty quickly without wastewater treatment, with all of the diseases. And there's many more than what I mentioned earlier with all of the diseases tied to fecal matter and waste. If you could imagine that that's just on the streets or I've heard stories of back in Europe, back in the 1700s or 1800s, people would go in a pot and throw it out the window and the people walking down below that was there would get it covered. And that was their, quote unquote, wastewater treatment. Well, with the necessity for disease prevention, the human civilization would last very long. Those diseases would just run rampant. That's why that's why wastewater is so critical. I mean, it wouldn't it wouldn't take long for those diseases to take off and people would be in serious trouble. So I'm thankful for the treatment plants that we have and the people that put all the effort and work into maintaining the whole system, from the collection system to industrial waste, our lab people, the operators and all of the people within the city that are tied to this to make this all happen. It's a joint effort. And without those people doing that, we couldn't live in the city of writing. It would be impossible. So I guess that's the closest I can come to here. You better have a place to run to in the mountains, I guess.

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