In many facilities, the maintenance department oversees the wastewater system. However, when a plant has a dedicated wastewater operator their whole job is ensuring that the wastewater leaving the facility meets all permitted discharge requirements. A Wastewater Operator is also known as a Water Quality Protector.
A wastewater operator should receive training for more than just wastewater treatment. This person should receive first responder and spill response training. They should know how to handle if the plating line hexavalent chrome spills and hits wastewater. They know what to do and how to correct that problem, so you don’t have a pass-through event. They receive maintenance training, so they know how to rebuild pumps, and they receive plumbing training so they know how to pipe properly and how pipes should flow and how to repair leaky pipes. Lastly, IT training is important so they know how to handle the PLC or SCADA unit that your system may be operating under.
If 90% of the time they look like they’re not really doing anything, you can trust and believe they are. They’re going through a checklist in their head. They’re listening to the pumps to make sure that they’re pumping properly, because you can tell a difference in the sound pumps make when a pump doesn’t work correctly. They’re smelling the air to make sure that the air smells the way it normally does, because if there’s a spill on a line the air quality in wastewater changes.
A best practice is to give an operator a checklist to run through every hour – make sure the floc is forming, check the pH, make sure the chemicals are feeding right and that there are chemicals to last. This ensures the system has eyes on it a regular interval and helps prevent pass through events.
This person can also help your organization understand why wastewater works with your manufacturing processes. For example, we had one customer who was able to calculate that for every gallon of wastewater that left the plant, 10 finished parts were produced. For those 10 finished parts they were able to calculate cost of manufacturing them, what waste treatment cost was and what the profit was.
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