With a degree in criminal justice and a work history in the casino industry, Jeff Michalak never imagined that in his mid-50s he would work in the wastewater treatment industry.

After all, he knew nothing about it. But in February 2021 he went to work at Douglas County’s North Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant in Minden, Nevada, a small town 15 miles from Lake Tahoe. He needed a job, and the county needed someone with mechanical experience.

In 2023 Michalak won the New Wastewater Operator of the Year award from the Nevada Rural Water Association, which conducted many of the classes he took to earn his certification. “They probably got used to seeing me at all the classes because I needed so many hours,” he laughs.

He received the award at the final luncheon at the NRWA convention: “I had no clue. I’m thinking, how do they even know I exist?”

NO GOING BACK

Michalak is originally from Wisconsin. After earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from  the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, he ran into a hiring freeze and a few other stumbling blocks when he tried to get a government job in his field. Eventually he decided to become a police officer.

He passed the physical agility and psychological tests and was finally accepted into the Criminal Justice - Law Enforcement Academy at Waukesha County (Wisconsin) Technical College. “But it was three months out,” he says. “So that’s when I went to Lake Tahoe on vacation.” He never returned.

He was quickly hired by a casino and enjoyed a 28-year career in the industry, first in security, then running warehouse operations for three casinos and finally in convention services. Then COVID hit. “They closed the casinos for the first time in history and there was no convention business,” Michalak says. “At first they put us on furlough, but the place was going broke, so then they fired us.”

A lucky conversation with North Valley plant operator Tom Taflin, an acquaintance at the time, led to his new career. “He told me the treatment plant was going to be hiring, so I put in for the job and ended up getting it,” Michalak says. His passion for mechanics was his ticket in.

“Being a mechanic is just being able to take things apart, figure them out and put them back together again,” he says. “That’s something I had been doing my whole life.” That was the easy part of the job. The hard part was learning the biology and chemistry. He had one year to get his certification.

OFFICIAL RECOGNITION

While working on his contact hour requirements, Michalak began his education process. “I went to a lot of classes and asked a lot of questions,” he says. The work paid off when, in 2022, he passed the exam on his first try for Grade I Wastewater Operator certification.

The North Valley plant uses a sequence batch reactor (Xylem). “The thing is basically a giant computer,” Michalak says. “The Xylem board controls everything. We have the ability to pull everything up on our iPads, run the plant off that, make changes, fix things.”

The three-year-old SBR replaced a 20-year-old activated sludge system that had maxed out on capacity as the population grew. The county chose the SBR for reasons including low cost, effluent quality and expandability.

“I think they spent about $11 million on it,” Michalak says. “It was a hard deal because it came online during COVID so there was nobody around to tell us how it works. So, we had to learn the hard way.”

The plant has two basins that cycle opposite each other, one filling and aerating while the other settles and decants. It is designed to run 0.9 mgd but can handle up to 1 mgd. “When we started the process we were running about 350,000 gpd, but they’re building like crazy around here. Plus we’ve had a lot of rain and snow lately, so we’re now about 500,000 gpd.”

If ever needed, expansion would be easy. “We probably have 100 acres of land,” Michalak says. “And the way the thing is built, we could just add on two more SBRs.”

PLANT OPERATIONS

Michalak runs the plant with Taflin and Auston Kinser, both Grade II Wastewater Operators. They also maintain 16 lift stations. “We do weekly PMs,” Michalak says. “We check everything, run all the numbers, make sure everything’s working right.” They fix the mechanical problems but call in an expert for SCADA issues.

The plant is manned eight hours a day, five days a week. Team members rotate on-call duty to respond to SCADA alarms, fix problems, and do two-and-a-half-hour rounds on Saturdays and Sundays.

Flygt pumps (Xylem) send influent to the plant’s pump station, which sends it to an augur (Lakeside) to pull out rags, and then to a grit separator (Smith & Loveless).

“From there, there’s alternating cycles between mixing where there’s 24 minutes of no air then 24 minutes of air,” Michalak says. “It does that five times. Then it settles and decants the clear water off the top. We skim that off and send it through a chlorine contact basin. Our chlorine residual is usually less than 1 mg/L.”

From there the effluent goes to a 40-acre pond where 60% or more of it evaporates. The rest is sent to a nearby farm for irrigation. Waste activated sludge is sent to a digester that cycles between aerobic and anerobic every four hours. A KSB pump then delivers the digested solids to 70-by-30-foot Geotube bags (TenCate Geocube), where polymer is added to aid dewatering.

“Water runs out of the bag, and after six to eight months of the bag drying out, we scoop it out and haul it to a landfill,” Michalak says.

PROBLEM SOLVING

The treatment plant handles wastewater from a variety of sources: residential, golf courses, an industrial park, an airport. Michalak observes, “The town and the different neighborhoods have their own wastewater treatment, but the county picks up all the big spaces where it needs to travel a long way. We take stuff from all over the valley that no one else takes.”

Every day is a learning experience: “It’s unbelievable how many things can happen on a daily basis. Every day you set out with a plan, and about 10 minutes into it your plan changes because something happened.

“One day we had a bizarre deal where a float that’s not even touching the water kicked a little bit and put the plant into high-flow mode, which shortens the length of a cycle. It shut the mixer and the air off to that basin because it doesn’t want to decant when there’s air or mixing going on. But we figured it out.”

In the winter of 2022-23 the area had an unusual amount of rain and snow, which caused flooding. About 100 manholes were underwater, leading to significant infiltration. On several days the plant saw flows over 1 mgd and a peak-day flow of 1.7 mgd.

One of the biggest challenges comes from a plant that makes juices for Starbucks. The plant’s wastewater containing fruit pulp is supposed to be sent to a storage tank pumped out by septic system contractors. But for various reasons some of that wastewater enters the sewer system.

“It’s super high BOD, and it’s a challenge to treat it,” Michalak says. “If anything suspicious like that happens, we go out and talk to them.”

Michalak enjoys solving problems: “If something’s not right, I’ll wrack my brain until I figure it out. And there’s tons of new stuff to learn all the time.”

BRIGHT FUTURE

As in many states, older operators are retiring and not enough new people are coming into the field. Nevada Rural Water is actively recruiting young people. But Michalak is hooked on the industry and is studying for his Grade II Wastewater Operator certification. He enjoys the work, not to mention the retirement benefits.

“It was a little late for me to be starting a whole new career,” he says. “It’s a world I knew nothing about. But it’s awesome. I wish I had done this a long time ago.”