(rock music) ♪ Hey (rock music) (equipment whirring) - Hi, everyone.

I'm Hana, and this is "STEM Works," the show where we explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and math and what makes them so much fun.

We take you inside businesses and talk to professionals in their field and explore what they do.

And today, we are headed over to visit with our friends at the Truckee Meadows Water Authority to see what it is that they do.

(bright upbeat music) (equipment whirring) Everyone knows that water is the most important resource on the planet.

We use it for drinking, cooking, and so much more.

You just turn on your faucet, and voila!

There it is!

Your crystal clear and clean water.

But do you also happen to know how this water gets to your house in the first place?

In the Reno-Sparks area, we're lucky to have the Truckee River as a source of water year round.

In fact, most of the Reno area gets its drinking water from the Truckee River, with only a small percentage coming from various other wells.

However, as clean as the Truckee River is, it is not clean enough to drink and use without purifying it first.

No matter how pristine, all rivers are filled with tiny, naturally-occurring, and manmade contaminants.

And the amount of these contaminants in the water is referred to as turbidity, which needs to be filtered out before it can be used for everyday purposes, such as drinking and washing.

However, it takes a lot of effort and scientific expertise to ensure the highest-quality water possible.

And that's exactly what Truckee Meadows Water Authority is all about.

Through rigorous testing, sophisticated chemical processes, and filtration systems, Truckee Meadows Water Authority ensures that our water quality conforms with federal and local drinking water standards to ensure that the water that comes out of your faucet is not just high quality, but also fresh, clean, and safe to drink.

Today, we'll get to talk with water treatment operator James Bryant, chemist Ryan Malkiewich, as well as associate chemist Stephanie Murillo.

So, come on.

Let's head over for a visit with our friends at Truckee Meadows Water Authority to see all that they do.

(bright upbeat music) (equipment whirring) Let's get right into it.

So tell us, what is your job at Truckee Meadows Water Authority?

- My job is to make sure that we have high-quality drinking water that's good for the community.

And I do that by coming out and visually inspecting my facility.

- We do things like taking samples, analyzing the samples, looking at the data.

- We sample wells, we go to reservoirs, bring back the samples we've collected during the week, and we're able to analyze it.

- Water's the most important resource that we have on earth, and so we're doing our due diligence to make sure that that water never stops flowing.

Throughout the day, we're constantly monitoring and following treatment techniques to make sure that we have high-quality drinking water.

- Make sure that it is safe for everyone, no matter where they are in our system.

- So how exactly do you keep our drinking water clean?

- So this is the flocculation sedimentation basin.

What we're trying to do on the first part of the basin is we're trying to form floc.

We're adding a small amount of chemical into the water as it becomes a heavier particle, and then we're mimicking mother nature by allowing it coming into our settling basin and just giving it time to actually remove itself by falling to the bottom and settling itself out.

- There is a lot that goes on here, and providing drinking water for 430,000 people is not a small task.

It is a big, long process of treating the water, making sure it's safe, and distributing it to everyone.

- We do a lot of customer calls, so people will call us if they have a problem with water quality in their homes.

We'll let the water run for a couple minutes to make sure we are pulling clean water from the main, and then we'll take samples.

So we're looking for pH.

And then we also look at turbidity, which is the clearness of the water.

- Part of our day-to-day is making sure that we take our samples, make sure that we don't have any bacteria, viruses.

- We run analysis of the samples we've collected, and we make sure that it is under the MCL, which is maximum contaminant level, to ensure that water is safe for our customers to drink.

- We are using a lot of instrumentation that's giving us real-time feedback.

At any one time, we can have up to 25,000 different points of information.

There is instruments telling us exactly what's coming off of the set basin that's going onto our filters.

- With the instruments in the analysis, there is a lot of maintenance that goes along with them, lots of different things that we need to run them.

We need to know that we're measuring things properly.

- Every three hours, we're coming out here taking a hard sample.

And I'm gonna go ahead and take it into my lab and actually verify it with hard instrumentation compared to my online instrumentation to make sure that we're getting the same reading all the time.

- That's great.

So what do you love the most about your job?

- I love this job 'cause it excites me every day.

Every week, we're doing something a little bit different.

As an operator, I actually move between the different facilities to keep our skills fresh, and so I get to be challenged every single day that I come to this job and learn something new.

- One of the big things I really love about my job, there's just a great variety of things to do.

You're actually making things.

You're going into the lab, you're doing reactions, you're coming up with a real final product and not just writing stuff down on paper.

- The fact that you're able to find the answers to questions like it's on the periodic table or you do math to find the solution to your answer, I think that is cool.

There's always gonna be an answer for what you're looking for.

- I love working with the instruments.

When I get to take them apart, put them back together, you really get to see how things work and learn how all the pieces interact and work together to make a really cool instrument.

- I just moved on to metals.

I'm enjoying that so far.

It's a new instrument for me to learn.

We use an ICP-MS. Used to analyze metals in the water.

- ICP-MS is inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.

It has a little torch on it.

It burns at about 8,000 degrees.

So the temperature of that torch, it's pretty close to what the temperature of the surface of the sun is.

That's what we use for measuring things like lead, copper, arsenic, chromium, all sorts of nasty metals that can make people very sick.

We can measure those things down to parts per billion.

- Thanks, Ryan.

And what about skills?

What are some of the most important skills in your job?

- Here at TMWA, a big part of the skills you need is to be able to be willing to learn, come in wanting to learn.

Along with English, math, all these other skills, computer-based technology, engineering, all that stuff's super important to be able to come into a job such as mine or others very similar to this.

I learned all kinds of cool skills.

- I love that about my job.

You're always definitely learning new things, adapting to new situations or new technology that comes out, new information.

- Part of that is coming with teamwork, being able to work with a lot of different personalities that help and train you to be able to learn skills that you need here on the job to ensure that we have high-quality water delivered to everybody's home.

- [Ryan] With all the different departments in the company, it's really nice to know there's so much that we can learn from everyone else around.

- I actually got paid on the job training with Truckee Meadows Water Authority.

After two years, I was able to license out and become a journeyman worker for Truckee Meadows Water Authority.

- What other advice do you have for us?

- Definitely get involved.

Join science clubs, I think those are great resources.

You know, talk to your science teachers.

They have great knowledge.

- There really is just a lot of cool things to do with chemistry and math.

And once you start to apply them, it becomes a lot of fun.

- I think with STEM, there's so many careers out there that you can apply your degree to, and I think that's the cool thing about it.

There's just so many opportunities out there.

- I'm lucky.

Be a lucky guy like me.

Work for a company that's gonna want to pay you to learn and do the job, and then give them that quality back.

- That was so cool.

I had no idea how much goes into providing and taking care of our drinking water.

Thanks to Ryan, James, and Stephanie, we found out all about what they do, what it takes to work at Truckee Meadows Water Authority, and how they keep our drinking water clean and safe.

I hope you had as much fun as I did, finding out about these awesome careers at Truckee Meadows Water Authority.

Well, that's about all the time we have.

But I wanna thank you for joining us for this episode of PBS Reno "STEM Works."

You can find out more information about Truckee Meadows Water Authority at their website, tmwa.com.

For more information on these careers and others, visit pbsreno.org/stemworks.

And as always, don't forget to get out there and discover what it is that gets you going and on the right path to your STEM future.

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