Rayburn Casey Hall
The management at the Moccasin Bend Waste Water Treatment Plant started giving tours to the public to build a positive public relationship with the customers. It was a program to educate the public on what happened to their waste water after they disposed of it. Also it was hoped that once the customers seen what was involved in treating the waste water, that they would understand why the sewer cost attached to their water bill was so high.
In the beginning my superintendent, Jerry Stewart, would give the classroom portion of the tour. Jerry would go thru the process explaining how the water got from their home to the plant and what was done to the water in the plant from start to finish. It was my job to collect samples from each process in the plant for him to use in the classroom to demonstrate what the water looked like before and after each step. After his classroom portion was over I took the group on a tour of the plant showing them each step of treatment.
Jerry is a natural teacher and a very funny entertainer. You could hear the groups laughing just about the whole time the class lasted. Having a speech defect and an introverted personality, the tours were hard for me to conduct at times. Later when Jerry was promoted to Director and I started doing both the classroom and plant tours, I felt like a complete failure after each group left. But after doing it a few times I developed my own program and found that I also had an ability to entertain most people and I became more comfortable with the responsibility. But as you will see further down there were some obstacles I could never overcome no matter how hard I tried. But I came to the conclusion after beating myself down for awhile that you can’t please everybody. After talking to Jerry one day about how successful he was, he informed me that he failed at winning the groups over at times too.
Tours were given to one person or any group that requested one. There were several local elementary, middle, and high school science classes that took the tours each year. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Chattanooga State Community College brought their environmental classes for tours each semester.
I had to be really careful with the grammar school kids while leading them around the plant. They were curious about everything they seen in the plant and wanted to get up close for a closer look. They were kept on the roadways and only allowed to see some of the processes that we felt were safe enough to let them near.
I probably enjoyed giving tours to the middle school kids more than any other groups. They were not only curious about the equipment in the plant but about how waste water got from their house and treated and where it went. They asked lots of intelligent questions about the treatment processes. And I always enjoyed a group that asked a lot of questions instead of making me stand there for 30 minutes making a speech.
I think the high school kids were interested in the processes used to collect and treat waste water because they paid attention while I was talking to them. But it was difficult to get a question/answer discussion going with them. I figured that it must have been a peer pressure thing. They were afraid they would ask something that the others in their group would consider funny. But sometimes there was a kid that either didn’t care if he was laughed at or his curiosity got the better of him. If one of the kids broke the ice, there would be others that followed with more questions. And that resulted in a lively discussion which helped me relate to them more.
I always dreaded giving tours to environmental classes from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The majority of them were taking environmental courses because it was a required subject. They hated the idea of being around human waste and the smell of it made them sick, some of them actually threw up. Most had no sense of humor at all. You could rarely get a smile or laugh out of them. I would stand in front of them in the class room explaining the steps in treating waste water and I felt like I was in a room talking to myself. Some would go to sleep. I would ask them questions and receive stares and dead silence.
The tours thru the plant were worse. While I was explaining what was happening in a particular process or what a piece of equipment was for, the group would be standing almost out of hearing range from me, some with their backs to me, holding their nose, and complaining about how bad it smelled. I never said it, but I always wanted to say “that’s your turd floating around out there; it has your name on it, what’s your problem.
The environmental classes from Chattanooga State Community College were always a pleasure to work with. There was a mixture of people in the classes. Teenagers out of high school, young men working at night and attending college to complete their degrees, women pursuing a dream to get a degree after their kids were grown. With the exception of most of the teenagers, most were interested in what they could learn about waste water treatment. Some were interested because they wanted to be sure to pass the environmental course. But some were actually interested in the science and technology of treating waste water. Those people had actually wondered where the water went and what happened to it after they flushed their commode.
The Chattanooga State students didn’t like the smell in the plant either, but they weren’t offended by it, and I didn’t feel insulted by them. They had a good sense of humor about it all. I had one tour where every student brought a mask and put them on and took a group picture.
I guess once I figured out I had an uninterested, non-responsive group, and I seen I was going to bomb no matter what I done; I went thru the routine with the same attitude. But when I had a group that interacted with me, I’m confident that I was a good tour guide and even entertaining. I knew I did a good job when a grammar school teacher would send me a packet of letters from each student thanking me for the tour. And they would have little notes referring to something I had said or had drawn a picture of something they had seen in the plant. A lot of times I would get a call from a college student asking a question about something they didn’t quite understand during the tour. This made me feel like I had accomplished something for the city and the waste water treatment industry.
The most memorable acknowledgement that I received was from a middle school class from Silverdale Baptist private school. When they started to leave after the tour they gave me a Payday candy bar and a bottle of mellow yellow.
The biggest insult I ever got was from a teacher from GPS, an all private girl’s school. I gave them the routine in the classroom and we started on the tour. That’s when the teacher informed me that she was only interested in seeing the laboratory. And that she didn’t want her girls exposed to the waste water in the plant and that these girls would never have any need to know what was happening in the plant.
After the tour I would always explain to the groups how important waste water treatment was to the public’s well being and asked them to imagine the environment, if waste water treatment plants didn’t exist and if nobody was willing to work in them. Most of the people gained a new appreciation for the plant and the people that work in it.
And I always explained to them that there were many opportunities for a career in treating waste water. The field needed biologist, chemist, engineers, mechanics, plant operators, instrumentation techs, electricians, computer operators and programmers. I also informed them that a lot of people had sworn to me after the tour, that they would never step foot in this place again, but a lot of those people had come back after finishing college and applied for a job and were working for me now.
At the end of the tours everybody went back to the classroom and each group was given an opportunity to ask questions. This was an opportunity to cover something that I may not have made clear or for that matter I may have omitted something that a student was curious about. But a few of the questions was about me.
1. How long you been here? Ever how many years it was at that time, always amazed them that someone would work in a place like this for that many years.
2. Do you ever get used to the smell? I explained that it smelled a little better each time I got a raise. Since I had been there I had failed to get a raise one time, and it sure did stink that year. (If I was still working there this would have been my fourth year without a raise. Whew)
3. Has anybody ever fell in? I explained to them the events of a few people falling in and if they were completely submerged they qualified to be inducted to a Waste Water Snorkeling club for life. (Whether they wanted to be or not)
4. What is the strangest thing that you have ever seen in the sewers? I would always tell about the strange phone call that the front office receptionist got from Erlanger hospital one day. An employee at the hospital dropped a section of a cancerous colon down the drain to a sewer. They called and requested that we be on the lookout for it coming into the plant. It was never seen, but it was the conversation around the plant for a day or two, and a good story to tell the tour groups.
In conducting tours of the plant and educating the public about waste water I gained a new confident in myself. I was not only proud to be a part of the waste water industry but proud of having the opportunity to meet the students and teachers in my community. It may not seem at times that I made very much impact in gaining respect for our industry but every once in awhile there would be a student that let you know he/she appreciated what we did for the environment. And I recommend any waste water treatment plant to start a program giving tours for the public. We need all the friends we can get.
Please let me know that you were here by making a comment. If you like the subject of my blog I hope you will become a follower.
No comments:
Post a Comment