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Interstate Water Report
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Current Issue
What’s It Like Out There?
An Intern (and Aspiring Chemist) Visits a WWTP Lab
by Emma Downs
As a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, majoring in chemistry, I am not yet sure what path my career will take. It is a time for exploring possibilities. One option I hadn’t considered was working in the wastewater treatment industry. But through my internship at NEIWPCC, I’ve been exposed to the wastewater field. And through a visit with Karen Driggers at the Greater Lawrence Sanitary District plant in North Andover, Mass., I got a firsthand look at a fascinating position in the industry.
Driggers never planned on working in a wastewater treatment facility. Though she had always worked in the environmental field, wastewater wasn’t a particular interest. Then, in 1991, a friend who worked at the GLSD told her about a job opening at the plant.
“The doors were open for me,” Driggers said. She was hired as a lab technician at the GLSD and later promoted to her current position, chief lab technician and instrumental chemist.
“It’s fun and exciting work,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here for 17 years.”
About 30 percent of Driggers’s duties involve in-house process control, making sure all parts of the plant are doing their jobs. Each day the lab tests levels of bacteria, residual chlorine, total suspended solids, biochemical oxygen demand, and pH. When the results for bacteria exceed the guidelines, the results are reported and appropriate advisories are issued for water users downstream. This happens occasionally, especially during heavy rains.
In addition to routine testing, Driggers sometimes gets the chance to try out and even develop new methodology. It’s her favorite part of the job.
“I like the challenges,” she said.
I watched as she prepared to perform a test made necessary by a new requirement in the plant’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, which specifies everything the plant must do in return for being allowed to discharge its treated water into the Merrimack River. The new requirement stipulates that the plant must monitor the total phosphorus levels in its effluent. It’s Driggers’s job to run the monitoring tests and report the results.
On the day of my visit, she was still developing the process. Since she had no idea what phosphorus levels to expect in the effluent, she didn’t know where to set her control samples. As it turned out, the levels in the test samples ended up higher than those in the control samples, so the results were invalid. Tweaking the process to ensure valid results in the future is what Driggers gets paid to do.
Another large part of her work is industrial monitoring. Many companies in the five towns served by the GLSD—Andover, Lawrence, Methuen, and North Andover in Massachusetts, and Salem in New Hampshire—pretreat and discharge their own processed wastewater to the plant. Driggers and others at the GLSD sample this industrial effluent for pollutants such as cyanides, oil and grease, suspended solids, and heavy metals. The monitored companies include makers of textiles, dairy products, and pharmaceuticals, as well as metal finishers, and only rarely does the sampling process reveal any violation of pollutant limits. When violations do occur, the GLSD quickly informs the responsible party and works to get the problem resolved cooperatively.
For Driggers, working in the wastewater industry means never running out of work to be done.
“Every day is a different day,” she said. “There’s always something to do.”
While my visit to the GLSD lab was very interesting, I can’t say it made my career path any clearer. But it did give me one more entry on my list of possibilities.
Emma Downs, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote this article during an internship at NEIWPCC’s Lowell headquarters.