Onsite wastewater training centers break new ground

by Cathleen Falvey
NETCSC Contributing Writer

Not long ago, quality onsite wastewater
system training was hard to find. Onsite wastewater training just wasn’t a priority for many states, even though a quarter of homes nationwide use onsite systems, and in some states the percentage is much higher.

But times are changing. Now, many states have centers devoted to onsite wastewater education, and new training programs are popping up all over the country. Health department officials, onsite system regulators, pumpers/haulers, and system designers and installers finally have choices for continuing their professional education. Some training centers also have expanded their focus to target other small community environmental issues and additional audiences, such as homeowners, public officials, and
college students.

University of Arizona Maricopa Agricultural Center Onsite Wastewater Training Center

A new onsite wastewater training center, which has yet to be officially named, is getting started in central Arizona. Kitt Farrell-Poe, associate professor with the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department at the University of Arizona (UAZ) and State Cooperative Extension water quality coordinator, heads up the effort. She and her colleagues were inspired to develop the center by a regulator who visited the university looking for help with a project.

“Colin Bishop of Orenco Systems, Inc., who was a regulator for Mohave County at the time, came to the Maricopa Agricultural Center director in search of collaborators for his own training center,” says Farrell-Poe. “It was through Colin that we developed the idea for the training center at Maricopa. He had managed to
successfully pull together an onsite system demonstration center on a shoe-string budget, which also describes our situation.”

Farrell-Poe has been raising money for the UAZ training center through conference registrations and by writing grant proposals. In spring 2002, she taught an onsite wastewater system design course online, and she is planning a training course on installing conventional onsite systems in Arizona for practitioners in the fall.

“Our training center site at the Maricopa Agricultural Center has electricity and water, but no technologies have been installed yet,” says Farrell-Poe. However, I received equipment already from three manufacturers—Zoeller, Inc., Tuf-Tite, and Bio-Microbics,”
she says.

Farrell-Poe said the training center site also includes a building with a classroom, and the main agricultural center building, located nearby, provides additional meeting rooms. She is looking for manufacturers to install systems at the site for training purposes.

This center is Arizona’s second onsite system training center. The Onsite Wastewater Demonstration Project in Flagstaff is affiliated with Northern Arizona University. Paul Trotta, Ph.D., P.E., is director. Farrell-Poe explains that the two centers work together, but are separate. “At the northern center, they demonstrate systems in cold weather and rocky soils,” she says. “Our center will demonstrate the same technologies under warm weather and sandy soil conditions.”

Arizona Cooperative Extension recently
co-sponsored a meeting with the National Association of Wastewater Transporters for onsite system inspection training and certification. Regulators and practitioners who came to the workshop said they greatly appreciated the training and are looking forward to more.

“People are getting excited about the new training center,” says Farrell-Poe. “We plan to target local practitioners and regulators through mailings and advertise the courses nationally by posting them on Web sites and bulletin boards.”

For more information about the UAZ onsite wastewater training center, contact Farrell-Poe at (928) 782-3836 or via e-mail at kittfp@ag.arizona.edu.

University of Tennessee Center
for Decentralized Wastewater Management

Another new onsite system training center in the planning stages is the Center for Decentralized Wastewater Management at the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Middle Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station. According to John Buchanan, Ph.D., P.E., director of the center and assistant professor in Biosystems Engineering at UT, the center will be funded by federal 319 Clean Water Act grant money and matching funds. In addition to the university, three partners in the project will provide the matching funds: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Tennessee Onsite Wastewater Association.

“We’ve got this wonderful group of people who have come out and rallied around this proposal,” says Buchanan. “So I really think it’s going to be a very solid center.”

According to Buchanan, the center received funding on October 1, 2002. Although the
center has not offered any training courses yet, Buchanan and others involved with the center have been busy educating themselves by visiting other onsite training centers around the country.

“So far, we’ve been to onsite training centers in Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, Massachusetts, and Texas,” says Buchanan. “We’ve been trying to get a good feel for what’s out there and what works, so we can avoid reinventing the wheel.”

Jerry Steiner, a former employee and contractor for TVA, developed a seven-page questionnaire for the group to use when visiting different training centers. TVA will compile the questionnaire results into a report that may be a valuable tool for others working to establish onsite wastewater training programs.

According to Buchanan, the group has encountered a variety of educational methods at the centers visited. For example, the North Carolina and Florida centers provide displays that allow participants to troubleshoot systems and use leveling, surveying, and flow measurement equipment. They’ve also visited sites that do not have hands-on laboratories, but instead feature static displays that “allow someone to walk off the street, take a self-guided tour, and learn quite a bit.”

Buchanan would like the UT training center to include the best of both worlds. The Middle Tennessee Experiment Station at Spring Hill has a complete classroom facility onsite. There also is land adjacent that will be available for displays and clean-water demonstration systems.

“We will be much more than static displays and a training facility, however,” says Buchanan. “Obviously, we’re going to offer adult education for onsite system installers, designers, other practitioners, and homeowners, but we’re also going to develop college-level coursework for civil and environmental engineers, environmental specialists, and soil scientists. We also anticipate doing research and purchasing a trailer and mobile displays so we can travel around the state to conduct classes.”

Many decisions concerning the future of the training center will be made with the help of an advisory board that was developed to balance the various desires and agendas of partners and other stakeholder groups. In addition to the partners, Buchanan says the advisory board will include contractors and members of the Tennessee Professional Homebuilders Association, the Tennessee Professional Realtors Association, and others with a vested interest in onsite technologies.

“Onsite systems are going to be an issue, even in communities that have sewers,” says Buchanan. “With the TMDL [total maximum daily load] program ongoing, cities are not going to be able to increase their capacity for dumping treated wastewater into receiving waters any more. So we’re going to have to learn to develop this other capacity—this wonderful device called the soil—and bring water back into the watershed from that direction.”

Buchanan also noted that the Consortium of Institutes for Decentralized Wastewater Treatment is developing excellent curriculum materials for practitioners and college-level students that will be a great help in getting UT’s onsite training center off to a running start.

For more information about the UT Center for Decentralized Wastewater Management, contact Buchanan at (865) 974-7237 or by e-mail at jbuchan7@utk.edu.

Environmental Training Center
at Delaware Technical and Community College

According to Jerry Williams, Department Chair of the Environmental Training Center at Delaware Technical and Community College (DTCC), last year was a record year for his center.

“A total of 1,387 credit and non-credit students went through the center last year,”says Williams. “In many ways it was our busiest year so far.”

Onsite system practitioners, wastewater operators, and water system operators in Delaware can take courses at the DTCC center to become licensed or to maintain their licenses. In addition, the center offers a two-year associate technical degree in water and wastewater technology and has recently expanded its focus to include courses for well drillers and onsite technicians. The center also trains local elected and appointed officials. The courses for local officials include subjects such as oversight, management, and budget issues for both water and wastewater facilities.

Williams reports that the state increased the center’s funding by $100,000 last year, which has allowed it to expand its services. These services include free certification and recertification training for all municipal, county, and state operators. In addition, representatives from the DTCC center traveled to Turkey and Bulgaria last year to meet with educational and environmental officials. Officials from both countries have shown an interest in beginning environmental training centers.

“A technical college in Turkey has adopted our two-year degree program,” says Williams. “And with help from Senator Joseph Biden, we recently secured funding to help begin a national environmental training center in Bulgaria.”

In addition, the center has developed
certification programs for onsite wastewater technicians (i.e., pumpers, contractors, and designers) and for well drillers. Williams says the center also has requested a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to construct an onsite wastewater training facility. The new facility will include three classrooms, a large laboratory, and the land adjacent to the building. Examples of conventional and new onsite wastewater technologies will be installed on the land for training purposes.

For more information about the Environmental Training Center at DTCC, contact Williams at (302) 855-5900, via
e-mail at awillia2@college.dtcc.edu, or visit the training center’s Web site at dtcc.edu/owens/ccp/Pages/eti1.html.

New York Onsite Wastewater Treatment Training Network

New York’s Onsite Wastewater Treatment Training Network also has been on the move, literally. The training center used to be based at the State University of New York (SUNY) campus in Morrisville but recently relocated its administrative offices to the town of Delhi, New York.

“We’re a little different than the training centers in many states,” notes Doug Nelson, network member. “We’re a diversified center, and our intent is to offer training around the state, so we don’t really have classrooms or a centralized training center.”

“However,” Nelson says, “we do have a very nicely developed demonstration site in Morrisville with onsite wastewater facilities, which will have to be moved within the next year. The university plans to build a cogeneration facility on that site, but currently, the center is still at Morrisville and available for us to use free of charge.”

According to Nelson, manufacturers helped them build the Morrisville site and either donated the systems or provided them at a substantial discount. The network also received money from the National Onsite Demonstration Project that financed other things, such as electrical services needed at the site. Nelson anticipates help again from manufacturers when it comes time to relocate the systems.

The network recently hired a new coordinator, Lorraine Keckeisen, who is reorganizing the administrative office quickly, says Nelson. The network currently recognizes three courses, which it offers around the state: the first course is “Foundations of Onsite Systems,” the second is a regulatory review for onsite systems, and the third is a three-day course, “Site Appraisal for Onsite Systems.” The site appraisal course includes one day on soils, one day of site appraisals of new systems, and one day of site appraisals for existing systems. The course follows the structure of New York State’s onsite regulations.

Nelson says that network training programs primarily target contractors and local code enforcement officers but also try to attract engineers.

Mark Noga, chair of the network’s steering committee, says that one of the most exciting things the network will be doing in the near future is developing a new demonstration site in Delhi.

“The onsite systems we have in Morrisville are cutaways that use fresh water,” explains Noga. “If we can work out all the details, the opportunity we have now is to add actual operating systems on land adjacent to Delhi’s municipal sewage treatment plant.”

For more information about the New York Onsite Wastewater Treatment Training Network, contact Keckeisen at (607) 746-4152 or via e-mail at keckeilr@delhi.edu. Noga can be contacted via e-mail at marknoga@accucom.net.

Kentucky Onsite Wastewater Training Center

The Kentucky Onsite Wastewater Training Center was established in November 1999 and is located in Lawrenceburg at the Central Kentucky Technical College, Anderson Campus. The center is also under the guidance of the Kentucky State Onsite Association. Mike Davis, the center’s director, is the faculty and the only paid member of the staff.

“I coordinate the training at the center,” says Davis, “but we have volunteers from industry, health departments, and other educators—a wide range of folks from contractors to Ph.D.s—about 20 people in all—who come out and teach our classes for us.”

The center also offers a wide range of courses, including classes on site evaluation, soils, filters, pumps, the microbiology of onsite wastewater systems, water and wastewater characteristics, and general safety training classes for people working in trenches, confined spaces, and with pathogens. The Lawrenceburg site includes a school and a 2.3-acre demonstration site with recirculating gravel filters, peat filters, fixed media, wetlands, and an onsite lagoon system common in Kentucky.

“We’re putting in more systems all the time,” says Davis. Because the training center is partially funded with federal 319 Clean Water Act money, they charge for courses only on a cost recovery basis.

“Our installers in Kentucky have to maintain continuing education hours, so we are happy that we can offer them courses for $50 per day, which basically just recoups operating costs for the facility,” says Davis.

Davis believes that one of the most important services the center performs is outreach to educate communities and installers. “We travel and have taught classes from one end of the state to the other,” notes Davis. “As a result, I believe we get more professional installers who tend to learn more about what they do and do a better job. This keeps them in compliance, which keeps our streams, rivers, and lakes cleaner.”

The Kentucky center is beginning an interesting initiative to attract new audiences such as developers, real estate professionals, local officials, and homeowners, as well as installers, manufacturers, and health department officials.

“We’re going to start locally, first targeting a four-county area by conducting training sessions for local real estate agents, county judges and commissioners, and city mayors,” explains Davis. “We’ll be sending them letters and putting ads in newspapers. Then we will develop 30-second public service announcements to be run across the state on how to take care of your system and things to look for. We hope to generate interest among homeowners that way, and they’ll be able to contact us with
questions.”

Davis says that the center is getting ready to do its first course for homeowners. With the little bit of work they’ve done to publicize the course, Davis already receives five to 10 calls per week from homeowners.

For more information about the Kentucky Onsite Wastewater Training Center, contact Davis at (502) 839-5082 or via e-mail at mike.davis@kctcs.net. You may also visit the training center’s Web site at www.kentucky
onsite.org.