Late in July, I joined water and wastewater managers from around the state, as we gathered in El Dorado, for the Arkansas Water and Wastewater Managers Association’s (AWWMA) annual conference. From large utilities like Beaver Water District, who serve hundreds of thousands of residents, businesses, industries, and institutions, to small community systems that serve only a fraction of that population, we all face the same challenge. How do we serve our communities with clean drinking water and safe, sufficient sanitation under ever-growing regulatory and financial pressures? Yes, I referred only to water systems in the example above, but make no mistake, the expectation to support aging infrastructure and/or provide new infrastructure to serve growing communities, while also keeping affordability, is a seemingly impossible challenge for many.
I have been involved with AWWMA for almost 20 years. Granted, the first several years were when I was a consulting engineer with a local engineering firm, and the expectation was that we consultants were to be seen but not heard! At that time, the perspective of the Association was focused on providing utility managers and leaders with the opportunity for peer-to-peer collaboration only. However, as we all know, every entity must evolve to continue to survive, which is what they did. The AWWMA began encouraging participation from consulting firms, state agencies, leadership development professionals, and other organizations that the utilities partnered with routinely. This successful and continued evolution of the Association has effectively provided utility leadership with the support and resources needed to address the challenges they have faced, are facing, or may be facing in the future.
Several weeks ago, I stood watching the BWD maintenance crew battle the heat and humidity while repairing a chemical feed line. It was one of several important and difficult issues that our maintenance staff had dealt with that day. That afternoon, our Operators, Electrical, and Instrumentation folks were engaging with an uncooperative generator, one of 6 that we rely on to get off of commercial power during the peak demand hours of the day. For some perspective, each of the district’s five large generators can supply 2 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, which is enough electricity for more than 40,000 homes on a hot summer day. However, we need all 10 MWh to provide enough electricity to run our treatment plants during that same hot summer day! If you have read one of my messages before, you have “heard” me sing the praises of BWD’s employees and the water and wastewater teams of our customer cities. The jobs that they do every day often go unnoticed and underappreciated. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that we all enjoy abundant, safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.
Whether out in the watersheds of our drinking water sources, in a manhole or pipe vault at a treatment plant, or out in the distribution or collection systems, there are people who work hard every day to protect our health and ensure the future of our communities. In El Dorado, many of the leaders of the water industry in our state gathered to learn from and collaborate with each other. Not because they had to, but like all those folks I have mentioned already, they want to. They go to work every day to serve millions of Arkansans, across communities both large and small, with one of the most basic and critical needs. For that, I want to say, “Thank you!” and I hope you will too!