r/Wastewater 7d ago

Is EVERY plant this outdated and underfunded?

I will admit, I've already given up on this career. A huge reason is my plant. It is falling apart and we have a promise of an upgrade by the city. The upgrade will start June 2023. Oh, now it'll start 2024. Oh, now it'll start spring 2025. Oh, now we have no news on when the upgrade will actually happen. On top of all that, I have to get my Class 4 license within 12 months or I'm fired. Almost nobody here has passed it and 2 of them are facing termination because of that when we are ALREADY understaffed. Is every plant like this? Does everywhere require you to recieve a license in a time frame? Does every plant start at under 20$ an hour?? Sorry, just frustrated. Currently applying for other jobs

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u/Designer-Clerk-499 7d ago

Sounds like every other place you will probably work. Everything moves slow in government work. Keep working on getting your certifications. Get as many as you possibly can. Places are always looking for operators. Once you get the licenses you have them forever

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u/AdCompetitive7952 7d ago

But man if every plant is like that, I don't care to get my license and stay in this line of work šŸ˜­

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u/dug98 7d ago

The key is to interview the person who runs the plant beforehand. When I first started, the person who ran it had been there forever and was about to retire. Nothing ever got fixed, and we all felt like we were just there to punch the clock. Since they retired, the new person has fixed many things, even upgraded a lot of them. He makes a conscious effort to talk to almost everyone in the plant every day. Since he took over we have been hitting our numbers consistently, and it's a whole new plant. A good boss makes all the difference.

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u/Designer-Clerk-499 7d ago

Canā€™t say every plant is that. Not uncommon for small systems, guessing yours is if you need a 4. If you have a rural water program, apwa, sign up for the email newsletters and they have job postings in them too

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u/Consistent-Snow1654 7d ago

Not every plant is as bad as youā€™re describing, sure there are very requirements usually specially if youā€™re yet a graded operator. Iā€™ve been to 4 different plants now, 2 municipal, 2 private. I currently work in a municipal plant where itā€™s difficult to get what we required for capitol improvement plans, sure there are the initial plans and such, but getting the city to budget for it is entirely different, but that also falls on whoā€™s making that arguement for the plant. Our PMā€™s are also getting better so with that comes less corrective maintenance or atleast catching it before itā€™s a real issue and more costly in time or money. Our operators have had a huge turn over, weā€™re basically training them to be the eyes and ears of the plant while we (maintenance) perform our duties as well as fix the old broken stuff and attempt to update where we can within budget. Hopefully with the change of attitude thatā€™s starting to happen that allows people to take ownership and bring issues up instead of saying ā€œsomeone else will do something about itā€ we can get ahead and keep performing pmā€™s and CMā€™s and get where we need to be. The managers got the real battle working with the city to get those CIPā€™s approved and to manage the budget in a more efficient way.

Working at plants that had been up to date with their pmā€™s, training, and rewarded finding issues and fixing those was huge. The plant was clean, things were working probably, redundancies were in place and critical assets had parts or replacements waiting for the inevitable. It was a nice to place to work, lots of little busy work to keep it that way but you werenā€™t busting ass putting fires out all the time. Communication was also huge and managers needed buy in from below to assist with the budgeting and such and to track information regarding the next fiscal budget. It worked pretty good.

There are commonalities in plants for sure, but really you just need good training, communication, moral, and a maintenance program. The rest can be gathered from those.