Tag: service

Bogging in the Big Easy

So much to write that I hardly know where to begin. Let’s start with where I’ve been: in New Orleans!

One of my favorite cities in our country played host to 18,000 water professionals last week for the 85th annual WEFTEC conference. I’ve written about it every year. This week was inspiring and fun as always.

I left Friday and landed in the early afternoon, greeted at the airport by my very good friend Rob. Unfortunately the rain arrived with me. My plan to lead a small photowalk through the French Quarter was foiled by the weather, so instead I unpacked and hit the hotel gym to run a few miles overlooking the Mighty Mississippi. I saw barges being pushed along by tugboats and more than one paddlewheel riverboat.

The rain let up later and I met four friends on one of the many balconies over Bourbon Street for some fried alligator and oyster appetizers along with a yummy local pale ale called LA-31 Biere Pale. Thank goodness for texting…it’s so much easier these days to gather friends from various hotels and places around the city.

We gained a few more of my Entex colleagues and headed to the Crescent City Brewhaus for a delicious dinner and more craft beer. Ran into an informal meeting of WEF past-presidents, all of whom I know very well. Fueled up for Saturday’s Community Service Project.

I confess I turned in pretty early on Friday night, knowing I had to trek a mile to meet the bus early in the morning for the service project. It was warm but drizzling when two busses full of volunteers hit an extremely muddy City Park to get to work. Thank God for Haley who stopped to buy a hundred ponchos for volunteers the day before.

We knew it would be muddy, so we wore shoes we didn’t mind destroying, but many volunteers ended up just working barefoot because it was easier to move around. Our task was to plant 5000 native species of plants in a newly created wetland in a section of New Orleans City Park that isn’t opened yet since it was destroyed by Katrina. I had no idea how huge and beautiful City Park is! Almost three times the size of New York’s Central Park.

Before: The volunteers attack the bioswale planting.

My job there was to take professional photos to document the event, because we always push for and get a ton of press within the water industry. The 80+ volunteers listened carefully to the instructions of the landscape architect and then went to work with full gusto, finishing the planting in just over an hour. That was great except that we had planned to work a whole day, so we had to wait awhile in the pouring rain for our catered lunch to arrive.

Sarah carrying a flat of plants.
My friend and Entex colleague Erin Gallimore got very muddy.

Volunteers hard at work.

Entex Project Engineer Chuck McCall

Our project banner. My company’s logo is on there somewhere.

The Student Design Competition from UC Boulder had fun. The back of their shirts said “Environment Engineers Get Down and Dirty”! 
Me and my colleagues from Entex.

 Lunch was yummy southern BBQ on picnic benches under cover of a large overpass. Then we let the volunteers head back home while a handful of us committee leaders waited two more hours under a tree in the rain for the dignitaries to arrive for our big ceremony.

WEF SYPC Chair Eric Dodds and President Matt Bond

We ended up having said ceremony on the bus because it was too wet and muddy for everyone to walk out to the site and make their speeches. Unfortunately this also meant no outside press. We were expecting some because the Mayor of New Orleans and the City Council used our event to issue a proclamation naming October “Water’s Worth It” month. This is huge for WEF, since it’s our marketing campaign.

Haley Falconer explains the project to WEF Pres. Matt Bond and Past-Pres. Jeanette Brown

All in all, the community service project was a huge success despite the weather. My company was a donor to the project and six of our employees volunteered. The new wetland looks beautiful and I’m sure it will grow and flourish into a great spot in the park.

After: 5000 plants that will have a high survival rate.

Later that night some of the volunteers gathered at Gordon Biersch for our food and beer reward. I sat with one old friend, met two new friends and got to know another friend a little better. I got to share a bit about our adoption which is always awesome.

It was the perfect beginning to the week. And I can’t wait to do it again in  Chicago next year.

Giving Back in South Los Angeles

Last weekend 20,000 or so people who care deeply about and work in the water industry arrived in Los Angeles for the annual WEFTEC convention. We come to share our work and learn from each other, see old friends and learn about new technologies. For the past decade I’ve been heavily involved with the Water Environment Federation, especially in the role of creating opportunities for young, new members of our community.

One of the activities that we started four years ago is a water-related community service project associated with WEFTEC. The idea was to have something that allowed us to give back to the city where WEFTEC is held, since we experience that city’s benefits for a week. Last year we had an awesome project in the area of New Orleans most badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

This year we partnered with the City of Los Angeles to help them with a project in a tough neighborhood in South LA. Championed by a few city council members, the overall project included a brand new high school and took a blighted industrial lot across the street and converted it to a wetlands park. The park incorporates all kinds of cool engineering to collect and direct stormwater, treating it naturally and using it to create a habitat for plants and hopefully animals. The neighborhood we worked in is “park poor”, meaning they had a major lack of green space, so this wetlands park will be a huge asset and a hands-on education to the high school students next door.

Our part of the project was planting 37 trees along the street between the high school and the park. Our volunteers first installed novel collection pipes that would use rainwater runoff on the street to water each tree directly. These trees were specifically chosen because they are native to LA and able to adapt to long dry spells.

I’m so glad to be part of a trade organization that allows the young leadership to organize events like this. I’m proud of my friends on the Students and Young Professionals Committee, including Haley Falconer, who chaired this event. And of course I’m grateful to the young volunteers who took their Saturday at a big conference and went to work, many of whom were students from all over the country, like University of Miami and North Dakota State University.

2011 YP Service Project-0535

The WEF YP Service Project is just one of the ways my friends and I are creating opportunities for young engineers (including us!) to develop leadership skills. There’s nothing quite like trying to organize a big event like this to teach you how to lead.