Intro, interview, and transcription conducted by Shannon Hart and Conlan Donahue.
The winter morning air may be brisk but the welcome is warm for Doug Kaupp, the City of Lethbridge’s manager of water, wastewater, and stormwater. The smell of coffee and baked goods lingers in OWC’s boardroom, where Doug has spent numerous hours acting as the chair of the OWC Board of Directors. Doug’s professional role is to not only provide clean drinking water to 130,000 Lethbridge residents, but to also treat the wastewater coming from industry and households; additionally, he’s also willing to get his hands dirty to improve the state of the watershed! Whether he is exacting vengeance on spotted knapweed at a local weed pull, planting willow after willow, or learning more about food production, he is always striving to give back to the area he calls home. Doug is quietly unassuming, though there is a twinkle in his eye; the passion for what he does is clear as he expertly explains the connections between people, industry, and the headwaters. Just as the water he manages is vital to the watershed, it is inarguable that Doug Kaupp is equally essential to the water.
1. Where does our water come from and where does it go?
Our community water supply is from the Oldman river, the source of which is the headwaters. We pull water out of the river at the weir that is across from the university. When we are finished with the water, we put it back downstream after we treat it. From there, it becomes the resource for folks downstream for communities like Medicine Hat and beyond into Saskatchewan.
2. How would you describe the difference between water treatment and waste water treatment?
I have a favourite analogy that I use when I talk to people about the differences between the two treatments; it really comes down to the purpose being the foundation of the differences. The purpose of the water treatment at the front end of the community is to take water from the environment and make it potable, which means it is safe for public health. People can use it to bathe, drink, consume, and run their businesses, like processing food! The purpose of the wastewater treatment is to take that contaminated water from the community and treat it to reduce the impact on the environment when we put it back in. The water treatment on the technical front end is really quite simple, it’s a chemical/mechanical treatment process. We add chemicals into the water to assist with the removal of particles and contaminants that are suspended or dissolved in the water; the water is then filtered and disinfected with ultraviolet light and chlorine. Whereas at the wastewater treatment plant, there's also mechanical components like screening and settling, but the heavy lifting is done by biology. Bacteria are doing all the work to get the pollution out of the water. The analogy I use to try to describe how much more complicated wastewater treatment is that water treatment is like making lemonade; you add, stir, and pour, but wastewater treatment is more like brewing beer because it depends on temperature, living organisms. It's also complex, so a lot of things can go wrong. It is almost purely a biological process, very little chemistry is used at the wastewater treatment plant.
3. We’ve been called Canada’s premier food corridor, what exactly does that mean?
I think that label for our region hinges greatly on the high level of productivity of agriculture in our region, which is really attributed to the availability of water in the fields that is delivered through irrigation projects. Irrigation in Southern Alberta goes back to the late 1800s; there were many early projects that were delivered by the father of Lethbridge. Mr Galt owned all kinds of enterprises such as coal mining, railroads, and irrigation projects. Back then, there were projects diverting water from the St. Mary river. Even in the 1920s, there were the Lethbridge irrigation district diversions from the Oldman; diversions from the Bow were all done about a hundred years ago. Those projects in the last century have really contributed to the high level of productivity that we have in this region for food. There's a lot of different crops that are produced in our region; everything from corn, potatoes, carrots, beets, and onions are all produced at various scales locally for consumption. The region also supports a really high percentage of meat production. This is especially true for beef and feedlots; there are all kinds of mind blowing stats that about ¾ to 80 percent of all the beef sold in Canada comes from a cow that at least spent some time in this region before being processed. There’s some enormous feedlot operations, entire sections of land are where beef is finished. Within 50-100 km of Lethbridge, there is a huge amount of food that is produced and exported across the world.
4. So how does water quality affect all of that food?
There are guidelines for what kind of water quality is needed for agriculture or irrigation and the water in this region is really high quality. There isn't a lot of opportunity for contamination upstream. In general, our watershed is quite free of those kinds of activities on the land. You’ve got some forestry but there's not much underway with mining; it's generally just agriculture, so the water quality is typically quite good. In the end, some of our crops are quite sensitive to water quality; rooted crops like potatoes, onions and carrots need really high quality water to get high quality produce.
5. How does city water tie into agriculture? Is there a partnership there?
Yes, the irrigation projects deliver water to the fields. When it comes time to process the produce, there is the value-added process of turning a potato into a french fry or cutting corn off a cob and freezing it in a bag. That generally happens in the city with city water, so the food processing industries have requirements for water quality as well. They have programs where Agri-food Canada and Health Canada do audits on their processes and part of the things they need to keep track of and record to get through these audits is the quality of the water they are using. You can't process food with low quality water. It is really important when they are processing vegetables or meat products that the water is high quality.
6. How do the actions in the headwaters affect people who drink water here in Lethbridge?
D: Well, there are really two ways to look at it. One is that the Oldman River is, in my opinion, a high quality source since there isn't a lot of activity upstream. As a community water supply, it is hard to do much better with regards to surface water. But when your job is the public health of 120,000 people, the plant and the operators are always putting in the effort to meet the quality limits regardless of what is in the river. When we are talking about the quality of the water supply from a water plant perspective, we treat the water like it is contaminated every day. That it’s an open sewer, because we need to put the effort in regardless of how good the water is. The conditions change hour-to-hour, so if there is a thunderstorm, the river gets flashy, or in June when the flow is really high and debris is being washed in, we still have to deliver that same quality of water. The level of effort is always high and even in November/December when the water is relatively clean, we don’t let our guard down or back off on the level of effort.
We are disinfecting the water as though it's full of disease-causing organisms all the time because it's just too important to only be reacting when conditions aren't as good. It can be really quite dramatic. If you look at the turbidity of the river water when there’s ice cover in the middle of winter, I always say that late November is the most boring time for the operator because the water’s clean and nothing’s happening. You’re not expecting anything to happen, but the river water can be cleaner than 20 or 30 NTUs whereas in June or late May if we have snowmelt in the mountains and the high flows in the river, we have turbidities over four or five thousand. The river can get really muddy and a treatment plan has to be designed to handle both of those kinds of conditions. There’s cold, clean water and warm, mucky water and it still has to be amazing when it comes out of the tap. Sometimes when there’s the local melt and runoff in March, we can get some ammonia and other contamination from the land from when the local snow melts. We get most of our snow in March and a chinook always takes it away at some point, so there’s runoff and it’s not always out in the countryside. There’s also urban runoff from water from our storm systems and from the streets get washed into the river and can make for challenging conditions.
7. I’ve heard multiple times that Lethbridge's water is very good and that it's won a few awards. I gotta know, how big is your trophy shelf?
There are plaques on the wall at the water plant before my first day at the city so we have a long history of recognition for that. The source of the water, the Oldman river, has to take some of the credit because we’re starting out with some pretty good water to begin with. It just boils down to having a capable plant and really good people, conscientious staff that stay on top of that. There is a conference, the Western Canada Water Conference, in Calgary and they have this taste contest every fall. We entered six years ago the last time the conference was in Calgary and took first place and then we had a repeat just this last fall. There’s eight or nine water systems that entered the contest. It was pretty rewarding knowing that the second place went to Jasper and they have probably a better source being so high up in their system. In Canada, the Western Canada section includes Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, so that’s who we were competing against next spring. When we win that section, then I get an all-expense paid trip to the big annual conference. The last time, I went to Philadelphia with my water sample to represent Lethbridge-Western Canada and competed with systems all over North America. The big conference happens to be next June in Toronto so we’ll be taking Lethbridge water to Toronto to compete with Chicago and Denver and Los Angeles; we’ll see how we make out.
8. How did you get into this line of work?
I went to the University of Alberta and got a degree in chemical engineering. I graduated in the mid-80s and the typical career route is chemical processing or oil and gas. In the spring of 1986, the price of oil was about $7 a barrel and there was really no work so I ended up, through different opportunities, working and doing industrial water and wastewater treatment work. My earliest work experience as an engineer was for water treatment for power stations and oil and gas projects, dealing with wastewater from pulp mills and other factories and that sort of stuff; that’s where the water and wastewater seed was planted.
Eventually, I ended up at the City of Lethbridge as an engineer working at the treatment plant. I’ve been with the city 32 years and my role as the general manager has probably been 20 years. It works really well having water and wastewater working together because it allows us to have shared resources between the two utilities. I’ve got a small team of engineers that works both plants or deals with both underground systems and my public works people are guys that maintain the pipes and work on both. If I have to dig up a street to repair a water main, it could be the same guys digging up a sewer weeks later.
9. What’s your favourite part of the job and what’s your least favourite?
The engineer in me loves to solve problems. I think one of my favourite things is to come up with elegant solutions to difficult challenges and problem solve. The opportunity to come up with clever ways to deal with technical problems is definitely a highlight. I have other people doing that kind of stuff but when I can get into the weeds and tackle technical problems, there’s definitely some joy in that. I think when I first became a people manager, I was quite disappointed that I wouldn’t have as much time to deal with technical stuff.
In my original role, I wrote a lot of software and programming for the control systems. You have industrial computers that would open and close valves and start and stop pumps. I have often said that having machines as direct reports is really easy because when they screw up, you know it’s your fault because they just do what they’re told; people are way more complex than that. I’ve learned that there’s a lot of reward in managing people too. When they succeed, it’s extra special. It’s usually a culmination of a lot of things, unlike when you’re just telling the computer “Don’t let the level get higher than 3 metres,” The part I dislike the most is probably just the mundane administrative and sometimes political stuff. Dealing with the budgets and the inquiries from city council and that sort of stuff, but it’s all part of the job.
10. What can regular people do to keep our water great?
I think - especially for people that live in cities - it’s easy for them to get disconnected from the environment because everything is so convenient and the stormwater system is really designed to purposefully connect the city to the environment. You’re moving stormwater to protect properties. You’re conveying it through the city and back to the river to manage it, to prevent flooding. There’s a lot of different points of input into the storm system, nearly every property has a connection to that system. What you do at home impacts it (the system), just like at the watershed level. When we’re thinking about activities on the land having an impact on the river, it’s kind of like the storm system’s a micro-river, right? The activities on every property within the city can have an impact on the environment, whether it’s the application of fertilisers and pesticides, maintaining your lawn, or other activities where there’s opportunities for runoff into the system.
Washing your car in the driveway with soaps and chemicals can go straight into the river; people think that because the soap is biodegradable, it’s perfectly fine to put into the river. Everything that goes to the wastewater treatment plant is biodegradable because that’s what we’re doing is using biology to clean up your toilet water. What happens when things biodegrade is they consume oxygen, so you’ve got bacteria. The bacteria can break down the soap but in the process, it’s going to require oxygen to do that and that’s oxygen that’s swiped from the fish. We talk about BOD in the wastewater context, Biological Oxygen Demand; the biology needs oxygen to break down the contaminants and we want that to happen in the wastewater plant when doing industrial water and wastewater treatment work. The ecology can become starved of oxygen otherwise. Just because your soap bottle says it’s biodegradable doesn’t mean that there’s no harm to the environment.
This was produced by the OWC as part of the "Uniting Rural Producers and Urban Consumers" program, which was made possible by the support of Canadian Agricultural Partnership program, the Government of Alberta, and the Government of Canada.
Thank you to Doug Kaupp for his contributions to this project and to bettering the watershed for all those who live, work, and play here.
