JBER water doctors excel at preventive medicine

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Kyle Johnson
  • JBER Public Affairs
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  -- Imagine trying to drive up and down the hills of San Francisco in a vehicle with a manual transmission during the middle of the worst rush-hour traffic the city has to offer. Every time traffic starts to pick up speed, it slows back down again, accompanied by the familiar clunking of a primitive transmission as it shifts through gears.

Now imagine doing that with a clutch that's slipping - and still somehow making it to the front of the pack, beating everyone home in the subconscious competition nobody admits they're secretly having with the vehicles in front of them.

That's exactly what the Doyon Utilities Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson water treatment plant has been doing for decades, and nobody has been the wiser for it.

"We truly believe if customers aren't thinking about their water, then we are doing our job right," said Jack Willis, superintendent of the JBER water treatment plant. "People get up in the morning and go right to their taps to make their coffee, take a shower, and use the bathroom. If we're doing our job right, none of them are thinking 'Is this water safe?' It's already in the back of their head, 'It's our water and it's good.'"

In this case, good is a bit of an understatement. JBER's water treatment plant was recently awarded the Large Water System of the Year Award by the Alaska Water and Wastewater Management Association. One of his employees was also awarded AWWMA's Marty Lang award; a distinction given to a water professional who accomplishes the most with few resources.

Willis and his team have internalized this 'do more with less' mentality and been able to apply it to their operations with large degrees of success, Willis said.

The plant was built in 1954, more than a decade before the foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency and its requirements.

Because of this, Willis and his team have been playing catch-up with the newer plants, remodeling old aspects of the plant to meet code, or adjusting how they operate so they can ensure maximum safety for JBER residents.

The award is solid proof that they've been able to accomplish this - without any infractions.
"The last thing we want is to have a violation of anything," Willis said. "We've really taken the stance that we're not trying to reach the minimums, we're trying to excel past those and go for the maximums."

Willis and his team have maintained a level of rigid flexibility that directly reflects the people they support. Ask any vintage car or motorcycle fan and they'll tell you keeping an old machine at the front of the pack with all the new equipment coming out is hard work; and by taking ownership of the plant, Willis feels that's exactly what his team has done.

"I really feel strongly we have performed so well because of the operators that we have," Willis said. "They really take a lot of pride in their work."

As evidenced by the dissected lawnmower outside their front door, with its blades removed for repair or maybe just convenience, Willis' six water plant operators and one assistant wear many hats. One day they may find themselves painting their facilities and the next day they're doing industrial piping repairs in-house.

All while maintaining a steady flow of award-winning water to JBER, without pause.

"When troops have PT days, we can see when they've all gone back and hit the showers," Willis said. "Or if we have major construction activities and water trucks are stopping to fill up. We see that immediately,and we have to stop and make adjustments based on that."

This is largely due to the size of their clear well - a storage container designed to hold water ready to be consumed by customers.

"Typical demand on the plant is about 2,500 gallons per minute," Willis said. "That's a normal regular demand on the plant. It's not uncommon to see 4,000 gallons per minute."

The JBER plant's clear well currently holds 134,000 gallons of water.

"We have a very small clearwell here," Willis said. "It has enough water - finished, complete and ready to go to the customer - to last about 30 minutes in a high-demand period."

For the same reason it's impossible to put 16 fluid ounces of water in an 8-ounce cup, Willis' team can't preload in preparation for high-demand periods even if they know when it's going to happen. They just have to be ready to shift gears when it does.

With a small storage container, they have to be able to consistently push water into it as fast as it's going out, regardless of changing water conditions.

They're essentially doing what every commuter fails to do: staying in bumper-to-bumper traffic while maintaining a constant speed. On the highway, this inevitably leads to a jam, but the JBER water treatment plant can't afford a jam, so they go with the flow.

"Where we pull our water from - it's such small area that the water condition changes really fast," said Ken Wolkoff, a water treatment operator at the JBER plant for the past 15 years. "If it warms up outside - Bam! - We're hit with turbidity and we've got to make adjustments for that."

The plant takes natural muddy water from the Ship Creek Dam and adds a cationic polymer that causes the dirt to stick to itself, then sifts the dirt out, Willis said.

The overall clarity of the water is called turbidity and is measured by the amount of light that is let through, then quantified in nephelometric turbidity units. They also eliminate microbiological threats to send out the cool glacier water JBER residents drink from.

"Once indoor plumbing came about, disease really just declined in the U.S. and every other portion of the world that has received indoor plumbing," Willis said. "It really is preventive medicine. We really have the ability to affect people's health on a daily basis. We take that very seriously."

Preventive medicine may not be a bad way to phrase it either, these water doctors go through so much certification, it can take upwards of 12 years to be fully certified, Willis said.

That's almost double the time it takes to get a doctorate degree.

"The Doyon utilities JBER plant is a state-certified, Grade-4 plant," Willis said. "That's the highest level certification in Alaska. There aren't a whole lot of them and it requires higher levels of certified operators. We just hired a new operator ago, and we don't expect her to be on shift by herself at least for another four years."

That's just to be on shift by herself - not to get a Grade 4 certification.

The operators at the plant aren't complaining though; actually the buzz around the plant is largely directed at a much more exciting piece of news - even more exciting than their recent awards recognition. They are getting a $15 million makeover.

That's more than a 1,400 percent increase in treated water storage they can have ready for JBER during peak hours.

"In the next 18 months, we plan to break ground," Willis said. "What we are looking at getting is about 2 million gallons of additional clearwell storage."



"Right now, we're a car in San Francisco traffic, constantly having to adjust the plant every five or 10 minutes to meet demand," Willis said. "When we get the new clearwell it will be more like driving on the interstate in a desert."