Weekly comments from Dale Martin

Dale Martin
City Manager
Fernandina Beach
February 3, 2017 1:00 a.m.

Last month I worked with the Utilities Department as part of my series of work days with various City departments. Each month, I dedicate one day to spending the day with the staff in their “office.” The effort provides me an opportunity to learn more about what tasks and challenges they face. Just as importantly, in also enables me to simply meet and get to know more of the junior staff on a personal level: I enjoying hearing about spouses, kids, backgrounds, and general comments that I sometimes neglect to consider when conducting my daily tasks. I find those days to be very enlightening.

The day started with Mr. Joshua Davis. Mr. Davis has worked for the City for almost two decades, beginning first with the City’s golf course before transitioning to the Utilities Department. His work is primarily associated with the water system. I met him at the City facility near the City’s water tower on Atlantic Avenue at 7:00 AM to begin the day.

The day’s task was to flush fire hydrants. In any water system, it is preferred to minimize dead end water lines. Such lines typically do not adequately circulate water, which contributes to the need to flush hydrants. Flushing the hydrants also provides the opportunity to operate the hydrant mechanisms. Most of the time, fire hydrants are quiet sentries that are, fortunately, rarely called into service. When needed, though, they had better work!

The instructions provided to Mr. Davis were to start the flushing at the north end of the city in Old Town. We pulled up to the first hydrant and he gave me a quick lesson on the tools that we’d be using and the general process we’d repeat at each hydrant: find the water main valve; turn it off (or was it turn it on?); then remove one of the caps on the hydrant and tighten the others; then turn the hydrant on (or was it turn it off?); then turn the valve back on (that righty-tighty, lefty-loosey thing was repeated in my head dozens of times that morning); flush the hydrant (“Mr. Martin, you may not want to stand in front of the open cap when the valve is opened- just sayin’.”); check the pressure; turn the turn the hydrant off; remove, grease, and replace all the caps; record some notes; and move onto the next one (“Mr. Davis, I’m not sure if I turned the valve back on a couple of hydrants ago- can we go back and check?”).

After a few hours, we had flushed the hydrants in Old Town and had worked a little ways back toward downtown. Mr. Davis shared that flushing hydrants was somewhat tedious and routine. Since the City has over 800 hydrants, I told him to leave twenty or so for me to tend to when I needed a simpler day. We flushed about fifteen hydrants over the three or so hours that I worked with him.

After a short break, I shifted over to wastewater operations. My mentors for the afternoon were Mr. Michael Floyd and Mr. Ryan Strickland. When I arrived, Mr. Floyd offered an interesting comment: “I don’t want to have you do something you don’t want to do.” My immediate response was, “Well, why would I refuse to do something that other City employees are expected to do?” I shrugged off his concerns and said “Let’s get started!”

Mr. Strickland and I donned protective boots and a life preserver (okay, maybe I should have not have summarily dismissed Mr. Floyd’s caveat), grabbed a brush, and headed to one of the clarifiers. Let me offer a layman-like description of a typical wastewater (sewer) system. You flush the toilet and “stuff” flows through pumps and pipes to the treatment plant located near 8th and Lime Streets. Once at the plant, the “solids” are removed with gritters and presses (and disposed of at a landfill). The residual water is then treated with chemicals (nitrogen and chlorine, for example) and micro-organisms in a series of tanks, or clarifiers, before eventually being released into the river. Our task that day was to clean algae from the interior perimeter of one of the clarifiers.

We climbed into the clarifier, which would have been difficult even without the boots and life preserver- slip between a couple of rails, stretch awkwardly to a narrow (slick) ledge, and then step into a slippery, knee-deep watery trough. Mr. Strickland worked his side of the clarifier counterclockwise while I worked my side clockwise, scrubbing the accumulated algae from the sides and the bottom of the trough. We linked up at the opposite side where the water flowed out of the clarifier through a large pipe (“Mr. Martin, you may not want to get to close to the pipe.”).

After that task was completed, we returned to the office and I was introduced to the “bugs” that are introduced into the sewage to assist with the cleansing process. We observed several different bugs through a microscope and Mr. Floyd described how the distribution of the types of bugs was indicative of the “health” of the water being prepared for release.

We tend to very much take for granted our water and sewer systems: with little thought, we simply turn the tap or flush the toilet and expect the good stuff to flow out and the nasty stuff to flow away. Those activities are not universal throughout the world. The science and technology of the equipment and the education and experience of our operators should not be overlooked.

Thank you for the interesting work day.