- Truckee Meadows Water Authority, or TMWA, supplies drinking water to the region, so what's coming out of your tap and what you're using also typically to irrigate your lawn.

- [Lauren] The science of surface water relates to everybody.

- We get to work with the community and make sure they always have access to clean water coming out of their faucet every day.

(poised music) (faucet whooshes) (air whooshes) (poised music) - As a hydrogeologist, we focus on the subsurface geology and how water runs through it, as well as the quantity and quality of the water as a resource, so we're always looking at how much, where is it, and is it okay?

- At TMWA as a design engineer, I do a variety of things.

I spend most of my time coordinating with other agencies and other partners in town, as well as putting together designs on my own.

Project manager of a variety of different types of projects for TMWA.

- I help plan the water supply for all of our drinking water customers in Reno, Sparks, and Washoe County.

I look upstream at our reservoirs and river flows and figure out when we wanna store water and when we wanna release water to make sure that we have water when we need it for our community.

(air whooshes) (spirited music) So, on the senior hydrologist side, I do a lot of water supply planning for our region, so on the day to day, I'm looking at reservoir and river operations to make sure we have enough drinking water.

I do also long-range water supply planning.

We create this plan that looks out 20+ years into the future to ensure that we have adequate water supplies to meet our growing population here, and then on the watershed coordinator side of things, I work with a lot of other local organizations and agencies to help protect water supplies and water quality, so we work collaboratively to protect the river ecosystem and the water quality of the Truckee River and its tributaries.

- We are at a water main replacement in Sparks.

This is ahead of the city coming through and repaving the road, so when they do that, if we have an old main in the area, we'll come through ahead of them and replace that main with a new one.

So, the main coming through this road through here was put in, parts of it in the '30s and parts of it in the '40s.

It's cast iron, which is really brittle, we don't use it anymore, so it was a good opportunity for us to come through and replace that.

So, the new pipes going in almost everywhere are ductile iron.

It's a different type of metal.

It's a little bit better than cast iron in terms of it's less likely to break.

We also wrap it in basically a plastic bag that goes in the ground too to keep it from corroding.

We expect a lot of these new mains to go in to last more than a hundred years.

Projects like this could take anywhere from several weeks to several months, depending on how much main's getting put in.

I work with construction engineers who are kind of our eyes and ears out here along with the inspectors.

We have inspectors on every project like this too, where they're watching the contractor, making sure that things are getting built the way that the plans are designed.

We have people in hydrogeology that help with the design of wells because a lot of our projects are in wells and booster pump stations.

- We're in the field maybe, like, 60%, 70% of the time out here, physically going to wellhouses and checking water levels.

We're re-drilling new wells.

We do lots of science experiments.

We do a lot of sampling for water quality, a lot of investigation into what's going on.

We deal with a lot where we're storing water in the winter months down inside of our wells and then recovering that water later, so that requires a lot of investigative work, a lot of monitoring.

Wells are just like any other machine or something that needs preventative maintenance.

It's essentially the cleaning of the wells and getting things back into production and capacity.

(air whooshes) (spirited music) - I'm in the office probably 80% to 90% of the time.

Most of my day is communicating and coordinating with other partners, whether it's our operations and maintenance group, whether it's other engineers on different projects, consultants that are working on things for us, the city, the county, and then there's certain times of the year, you know, right now, I've got a couple construction projects that I'm spending a lot more time out and about.

- Every day's a little bit different.

When I first started, I did a lot of work in the field, so going out and measuring creeks and streams and ditches like behind us, but now more so, I spend a lot of time with our various stakeholders in meetings and collaborating with those partners to make sure that we are working on the, again, the water quantity side of things, so looking at the river operations, but I also do a lot of partnership with stakeholders that are focused on protecting the water quality of the river, so I work a lot in source water protection, which means that we are trying to actively work to protect our sources of drinking water, such as the river and our 90 production wells, to prevent future contamination.

(air whooshes) (poised music) - We've got multiple different level departments and we work with a lot of different people, so we're just used to working with each other.

You gotta be available for other people that may need something or have a different perspective on things, so you just gotta be open and willing to change your plans.

You build good relationships that way.

- Communication and collaboration are both huge for somebody in my position.

Problem-solving skills are probably the most important or just the willingness to do that, and understanding that you're gonna make mistakes and just know that that's okay and as long as you can work through the problems and come up with a solution.

(air whooshes) (spirited music) When I went to college, I actually started off as a mechanical engineering major, and I didn't know really what that meant, and I started taking some hydrology type of classes, or hydraulics, pipe design, water flow, and I was much more interested in that.

- I've really always been super interested in water, and then once I started learning more about Western water and Western water law, I got really interested in this space, and so I had never really considered working for a water utility, but I kind of just took a chance and applied and it just ended up being a really good fit and it's just been a really great experience.

(air whooshes) (spirited music) - Having that strong background in math or science will open a lot of doors for you.

When you come outta college, you shouldn't be nervous going into industry.

Maybe you really don't like being in an office all day designing on a computer.

If you wanna be out in the field doing construction work and solving problems, you know, that's something you can also do with a civil engineering degree, but there's a lot of different ways you could go and I think you have to decide what sort of lifestyle you want.

- I'd say just get out and do a lot of stuff.

Go do things you think you're not interested in.

Go on adventures.

If you can go and shadow somebody even for a weekend or a week or whatever it is, just put yourself out there.

I don't love math, but I'm using it in the terms of modeling and I've got software to do the math for me now, so school is a wonderful resource and you need it as a stepping stone, but everything I know now is all from experience and I'll never take that for granted.

I think it's been more important than any class I've ever taken.

- I would just say if you are seeing this or you are thinking about possibly wanting to be an engineer, go for it.

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