Sometimes we exercise. Sometimes we exercise in futility. On my way to the wastewater treatment plant at Piney Creek, I put on a little extra perfume. I wore sensible shoes, and still worried about getting them dirty. Entering the place where the flushings of a potential 88,000 people go, I longed for an adult-sized onesie of any color, durable material and superior coverage.

I decided my goal would be to get readers to think about things we so conveniently dismiss, about workers we would be remiss to ignore. I wanted the traffic busily passing high above the plant to realize in appreciation, “Thank God for those people.”

They’ve heard it all and seen most of it … the Piney Creek Wastewater Plant operators, serving over half of the city of Beckley and outlying areas like Mabscott and Airport Road, with the partnering Whitestick plant appointed to the balance. You’d have a hard time poking fun at poo around these guys.

They say when you’re dying, hearing is the last thing to go. I’m fairly certain smell is the first thing to surrender on a wastewater plant’s campus. At first the odor of untreated sewage (the influent) from the 23 pumps stationed across Beckley punches like a prizefighter. It must compare to what it’s like to breathe in for nearly half of the world without multi-million dollar sanitation systems.

A stray tomato plant grows on the grounds, heavy with ripe red fruit no one dares consume, a testament to life’s determination and its distaste for formality. From time to time, workers have found cantaloupes, watermelon and even cucumbers sprouting from persistent, errant seeds.

“Some (wastewater) plants have drying beds and they’ll have vegetables growing up all over,” says Chad Buzminsky, Piney Creek plant manager. “It’s just like Miracle Gro.”

The accidental gardens are the only landscaping, the rest of the operation strictly industrial in appearance, in existence since the 1930s and regularly updated with an assortment of basins and bacteria-cultivating apparatus.

The buildings, computers and containers all work together to separate solids from liquids and to properly process and return waste back to a harmless, usable form.

At their highest classification, wastewater plants like some in North Carolina are allowed to bag their own solid waste product and sell it as fertilizer to consumers.

Buzminsky is one of 10 experienced, strong-stomached men stationed at the plant who take their “dirty jobs” seriously.

“We are the biggest waste treatment plant in southern West Virginia,” he relates, beginning a tour he’s gone on countless times with oohing, ah-ing  (but mainly eeewww-ing) school children, groups of those whose environmental futures he is thankful to steward. “You start talking about poop, and they light up like a Christmas tree.”

The first stop is a place that would make a garbage man cuss, and, according to informal reports, does so on a regular basis. It is the stainless steel, massive Headworks bar screen that meets, greets and strains anything one-half inch or larger from the influent to protect the plant’s equipment from damage and to reduce the presence of inorganic matter — things that aren’t viable to return to the environment. The lesson the bar screen teaches? It’s amazing what people manage to flush.

“I’ve seen car parts, a fender (that probably fell through a manhole lid), jewelry, old coins, cell phones,” Buzminsky explains.

He tells the story of a supervisor who lost his cell phone down the toilet and who tracked it to the Piney Creek Plant where he ultimately retrieved it on the infamous bar screen.

“Any inorganic material is disposed of. The garbage guys aren’t too fond of wastewater plants.”

Free of inorganic debris, the flow makes its way at a speed supporting the separation of solids from liquids, the basic premise of what is to become of what we leave behind. It then collects in the primary clarifier, a basin that could serve as inspiration for engineers in hell designing an apropos public pool.

The massive, exposed circle of stink is generally what characterizes a wastewater treatment facility in appearance, but it serves a purpose beyond a big visual gross-out: It helps to manage the flow of both liquid and solid for ultimate biological decomposition.

I listen in disbelief as a story is told of a worker’s dog jumping into the 8-foot deep sauna of the unspeakable. The worker reportedly dove in after and saved him without hesitation and without further incident. The dog was ironically named “Lucky.”

From the primary clarifier of the p-word, the real science begins. Amazingly, the only thing added to “activate” the human sludge into a sped-up state of decomposition is dissolved oxygen.

“We aerate the aquatic bacteria,” Buzminsky explains, “They eat and settle. They have a metabolism just like a human being does.”

The bacteria in question, known as protozoans, are naturally found in our own systems, packing molecules of waste like a putrid picnic when supplied with the right conditions. They reduce the unusable portion of solids by digesting and reducing the sludge to stable levels of nitrogen gas, which are in turn released readily, harmlessly into the air.

The liquid portion of the separated, biologically processed waste then passes through UV filters that irradiate pathogens, rendering them genetically unable to reproduce, altering the water once discarded from our bodies so it is ready to reintroduce to the environment, in this case, via Piney Creek.

In order to keep these processes stable, an onsite laboratory exists, where laboratory manager Bill Gainer constantly measures the percentages and types of bacteria, examining them under microscopes to maintain acceptable levels. The same internal lab also measures effluent values (water leaving the plant) to stay within EPA and DEP standards for removal efficiency. Disinfected water is sampled daily before reentering the creek.

The only artificial additive used in the Piney Creek Plant’s treatment process is a polymer to thicken pathogen-free solids for ultimate reapplication at a local farm to grow hay or, during winter months, for disposal at the landfill. Before the solid waste portion becomes rich, dirt-like fertilizer for propagating animal feed, it is “baked” in a process to kill off pathogens, at a rather anticlimactic 95 degrees… “About the temperature of the body,” Buzminsky points out, drawing one of many parallels between the plant’s operations and our own internal processes.

There are two ways the plant is self-sufficient in its operations. In another bodily parallel, we release (ahem) methane; the wastewater plant likewise collects and releases methane. The anaerobic digester, a container for the solid portion of waste near the process conclusion, harvests methane gas that in turn helps with the plant’s energy efficiency. Non-potable but disinfected water derived from the separation process is also used for the plant’s own water needs.

The water exiting the plant is anecdotally fit for drinking, but Buzminsky isn’t holding out his coffee mug.

“We are way below what maximum allowable levels are on our readings, but it’s non-potable, not drinkable.”

He tells of an arguably brave former employee who would fill a beaker up and take a sip of the stream-ready effluent to prove a point.

“What most people don’t realize is downstream from some wastewater plant is a another plant that is pulling it back in, treating it, and returning it to homes. We are all drinking water that has been recycled.”

Piney Creek may be “turnover central” for Beckley’s waste but, surprisingly, there’s little turnover in human resources at the plant. Most of the men employed there, remain there.

Buzminsky says he thinks plants should give new hires about a month of sick time their first year.

“I used to stay sick until my body built up an immunity,” he remembers, adding there are times when things accidentally “splash or hit you in the face” in what just may be the dirtiest of all dirty jobs.

If it weren’t for the quiet, unobtrusive gentleman at the Piney Creek plant, we’d be skirting our own filth, emptying our chamber pots, peppering lye in our own outhouses, or doing as the bears do — along with a large percentage of the underdeveloped world. And we’d be doing it to our own detriment.

According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the world’s population, 2.6 billion people, don’t use toilets, causing an estimated 2 million preventable deaths each year. Sadly, infants account for the majority of victims worldwide.

Buzminsky and his colleagues aren’t potty-mouthed about how they make a living.  For them, it isn’t the job, but the prospects of what would be without the job, that is unthinkable.

“When you look at it that you are doing something for the environment,” he says, “then you feel good about what you do. Think about taking your boy or girl out fishing if there were no wastewater plants. How nasty would that be?”

— E-mail: lshrewsberry@register-herald.com