Water/​Wastewater Treatment Operator

Jonathan Piggot: My name's Jonathan Piggot. I'm an operations controller wastewater from the southern area based at the Mangere Wastewater Treatment plant.

I've been with Watercare for 12 years now. I started with Watercare labs, and from there moved over to the Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant. Worked on shift, from there worked my way up progressing into a process engineer. Finally I've been working as an operations controller for the last three years.

I'm responsible for looking after eight of the non-metropolitan wastewater treatment plants in the greater South Auckland area. Those eight wastewater treatment plants service around about 50,000 people. These people and the environment are the number one priority for the southern wastewater team.

I arrive at the treatment plant at around about 7.30 in the morning. From there I will be looking at the different monitoring systems we have to check the status of the plants, and then be ringing the guys and speaking to my different process technicians, and checking on any issues that may have occurred the night before, and ensuring that any problems can be resolved.
I'm also looking at the efficiency of our plants, checking chemical usage for optimisation as it is public money we're using, so we have to use that money wisely.

A couple of times a week I'll go meet face to face with my process technicians to have a one on one, find out how they're going, how the plants are running. Health and safety are always my first items on the agenda. We carry out regular inspections and look at the operation of plants to ensure operational efficiency and safety.

I enjoy mentoring because I like being able to pass on some of the knowledge I've got and see the guys growing and see the excitement they get from learning something new and being able to then carry out that and feel more empowered themselves.

One of the biggest challenges in my role is to bring the legacy plants we inherited from the former district councils up to a standard which will treat the wastewater to a higher quality.

In many of the areas in the greater South Auckland area the population is increasing at a dramatic rate – especially with the special housing areas that have been noted in Pokeno and Pukekohe – so we have to work closely with planning as some of the plants we already have now are reaching near the end of their capacity, and without working with planning we need to be able to start looking at the improvements and expansions required to keep up with growth in the area.

We rely heavily on the maintenance services team as they are critical to our operation. Without the help from the mechanical, electrical and instrumentation department the facilities would not be able to run smooth as they do.

We meet regularly with the Auckland Council consent compliance officer. We do this to ensure we keep open dialogue with the Auckland Council and to ensure that we keep them abreast of what is happening at the treatment plants.

When we do meet, we discuss the plant performance and how the plant is doing. We also look at and inform the council of any upgrades we may be doing, issues we may be experiencing and what we're going to do to resolve those problems.

The thing I love about my job is I'm doing my part to protect the environment in this lovely country we live in.

Watercare has given me a great variety of work opportunities and many challenges with a lot of support to go with that – all helping you move through your career progression into areas that sometimes you'd never thought you would go into before.

The people at Mangere are a great bunch of people. They're really a fun bunch to work with and there's lots of support and aroha. I'm Jonathan Piggot, and I'm the wastewater operations controller in the southern area of Watercare.