In today's episode of the 21st Century Water Podcast, we engage in an insightful conversation with Greg Eyerly, Director of Houston Water. Greg's journey through the water industry spans three decades, and his career trajectory is a testament to his willingness to take risks and make bold decisions. He started in the laboratory and transitioned to operations, a move that laid the foundation for his eventual rise to leadership. His experiences in both the private and public sectors, including significant roles in Clackamas County and the city of Salem, have equipped him with a comprehensive understanding of water management challenges and solutions.
Greg shares some pivotal moments in his career, such as his transition from a comfortable laboratory position to becoming a wastewater operator, and later advancing to management roles after earning an MBA. His role in the flood recovery of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, highlights his ability to handle large-scale crises, demonstrating his leadership and problem-solving skills. His move to Houston Water, driven by a desire to make a greater impact, underscores his commitment to addressing the city's unique water challenges.
Houston Water, the largest city-run water utility in the U.S., faces several strengths and weaknesses. Greg points out the city's strong water rights and proximity to abundant water sources as significant advantages. However, the aging infrastructure, lack of redundancy, and susceptibility to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and even ice events pose substantial challenges. Houston's rapid population growth also adds pressure to the water infrastructure.
Greg emphasizes the importance of raising awareness among elected officials and community partners about the risks and consequences of infrastructure failures. He discusses the ongoing efforts to comply with a $9 billion consent decree aimed at improving wastewater systems, alongside the critical need to address water leaks and aging pipes. Innovative use of AI technology significantly improves efficiency in inspecting and maintaining sewer systems, saving thousands of staff hours and reducing sanitary sewer overflows.
Looking ahead, Greg outlines major investment priorities, including the construction of a new oxygen plant, the rehabilitation of the East Water Purification Plant, and the replacement of deteriorating waterlines. These efforts are crucial to reducing water loss and ensuring the resilience of Houston's water infrastructure. He also highlights the importance of exploring governance models to better manage the utility's extensive responsibilities and improve regional collaboration.
Greg's leadership philosophy emphasizes flexibility, openness to opportunities, and the importance of building teams with subject matter experts. His vision for the future includes embracing circular economy principles, such as water reuse and recovery, and leveraging advanced technologies like digital twins to optimize operations.
In summary, Greg Eyerly's leadership at Houston Water is marked by a proactive approach to addressing infrastructure challenges, a commitment to innovation, and a dedication to improving water management for the benefit of the community and beyond. We look forward to seeing the continued progress and impact of his work in Houston.
More:
Houston Public Works: https://www.houstonpublicworks.org/
Voiceover (00:02):
Tremendous challenges and opportunities exist right now for our nation's water infrastructure. In this podcast, the industry's top leaders and innovative minds share their knowledge and insights for ensuring our water systems are operating safely and efficiently.
These discussions are designed to motivate and create vibrant 21st century water systems and the innovative workforce required to lead and operate them. This is 21st Century Water, with your host, Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani.
Mahesh Lunani (00:34):
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. In today's episode of the 21st Century Water Podcast, I'm excited to have Greg Eyerly, Director of Houston Water. Greg brings over three decades of expertise in water management and leads a diverse and talented staff of about 1,600 professionals within Houston Water.
His responsibilities cover water operations, wastewater operations, customer service planning, and regulatory compliance. Prior to joining Houston Water, Greg held leadership roles in Clackamas County and the city of Salem.
He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science from Portland State University and an MBA from Washington State University. Welcome, Greg, to a discussion about how you are leading from the front on the challenges facing Houston Water and your vision for the future of water.
Greg Eyerly (01:29):
It's a pleasure to be here Mahesh.
Mahesh Lunani (01:31):
You’ve had a distinguished career. What are the key decisions you have made in your water career so far, and how did that turn out?
Greg Eyerly (01:40):
Starting early on in my career, the only way I could really get into the business was to be hired into the laboratory. And the operations folks back when I started, over 30 years ago, they didn't have a whole lot of interest in having somebody with a four-year degree go out into the plants. They didn't think somebody with a college education would want to get dirty.
It's not that anybody wants to get dirty, it's a matter of how much you mind getting dirty. And so, first big decision I had to make was to leave the comfort of the laboratory where you knew what was going to happen every day and put on a uniform and steel toe boots and become an operator and go through the process of becoming certified as an operator and basically start at the bottom and that’s what I did.
My first job as an operator every day was to go down to the head works, remove the aluminum grating, and break up the grease that was floating on top of the head works, and fill garbage cans full of grease, and then drag these garbage cans up the stairs one rung at a time, and put them into a truck and drive them across town and put them into a dump truck that went to the landfill. So, starting there and taking that step back to move forward was an in critical point in my career.
And then while working as a wastewater operator, I went ahead and applied to graduate school and went and got my MBA at night. And the company I was working for, which eventually became US Filter, but at the time was a smaller company called Wheelabrator, EOS.
They waited until I got accepted into graduate school and I was just getting ready to make my first tuition payment, and they called me into the office and said, “How are you going to pay for graduate school?” And I said, “Well, I'm just going to pay for it out of the money I have or take a loan.”
And they said, “How about we pay for it, and you agree to become a manager someday once you graduate?” I was like, “Okay, where do I sign?” And so, that was my first big break was to get that degree, my MBA and had been an operator for about five years.
And then I was promoted into management, and they sent me to Arizona to run the operations for several locations in Arizona. I had never been a manager before. And I walked into a completely empty office with no computer, with just the stationary from the hotel and the pen they give you from the hotel and started managing at that point.
And so, that was a big decision to make and a big move to make. Eventually, I was promoted several times and became a regional manager. The next big decision I had to make at one point was leaving the private sector and going to the public sector and I did that.
In 2008, I moved to Iowa, leaving the private sector behind. All I knew was private sector, didn't know anything about public sector. And they were my clients, that's what I knew. And then the flood in Iowa hit right after I got there and that devastated the city of Cedar Rapids.
I was the wastewater utility manager there. I was in charge of water and wastewater there, and the flood hit devastated both the utility and Cedar Rapids. And so, I got the utility up and running very quickly fast enough that it distinguished me. And they asked me to apply to become the flood recovery director for the whole city.
And that's what I did for several years, is I led the city of Cedar Rapids back and I had to rebuild 311 public buildings, over 4,000 residents were flooded, 1,298 businesses were flooded. Roads, bridges, the dam was damaged.
It was a monumental task that as a former wastewater operator, it was a very humbling experience. So, those are key decisions. And then in 2021, just about three years ago today, about this time, I was interviewing a summer intern, or excuse me, a summer temporary worker who wanted to become a full-time employee.
And he had grown up on the African continent, and so he had a different appreciation of water than we do in the U.S. His name's Tim. And I asked him, “Why do you want to work here? Why do you want to become a full-time employee?”
And he said to me, “Making clean water is a beautiful thing. Water is life giving. What we do isn't important, and it's important to give to something greater than ourselves.” That was his quote. I wrote it down, and I was so moved by that, that I thought, “This guy who's started as a summer temporary worker understands the value of water and our purpose better than I do.”
And I've been doing it for 30 years and that played in my head to the point where I decided I went to my wife and I said, “Hey, look, I feel like I can give more than I'm giving here. I'm not giving all I can give.”
And so, we started looking around the country for opportunities to give more, and Houston, Texas came up on the map. It was in the middle of a consent decree. Nobody wants to necessarily take on that type of challenge and that's why I ended up in Texas.
Mahesh Lunani (07:35):
Wow. I mean, Greg, if I look at what you just said, you're a risk taker. You went from lab to an operator, MBA to private to public sector, flood control programs, and then you kind of, being as humble as it is, you listen to a summer intern and use those words to change the direction after 30 years where you headed.
That's quite something I've never heard that before for all the 35 plus episodes we have done on the podcast. I want to congratulate you for that. So, bringing that to Houston Water, I mean, it's one of the largest infrastructure you manage. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this massive infrastructure now that you've taken responsibility for running?
Greg Eyerly (08:22):
That's a great question. Every day I think I learn more about its weaknesses, but certainly the strengths. So, Houston Water, what's unique about Houston Water and Houston Water is the largest city run water wastewater utility in the United States. And that's important and we'll come back to that in a bit.
Houston Water's strengths? Well, it is our proximity to raw water on the drinking water side. We're pretty close to a lot of water, and that's a lot of water in Texas terms. So, what's unique about Texas is it has 6,976 reservoirs and one natural lake. There's only one natural lake in Texas.
So, the water we have in store is the water that we make an effort to do that. And so, the dams that were built in Texas were built primarily for storage. They were not built for flood control. They were not built to create reservoirs so people can recreate. Those are not the primary purposes. They are to store water for use.
So, Houston has strong water rights. We are close to a lot of water. We are at the very southeast part of the state, on the wet side of the state. We get up to annual rainfall of 50 inches a year, that is our strength.
Also, Texas is growing as a state, and the eastern is growing as an area, and that's a strength to our infrastructure. Last year, 473,000 people moved to Texas. That's 1,400 people a day. Houston itself, the Houston Metro area, it grew well over a hundred thousand people.
We serve 5.14 million people in Houston Water on the water side, which is a little more than the wastewater side. So, we're growing. That is the strength. We have good water rights; we have good access to water. So, that is our strength of our infrastructure.
Mahesh Lunani (10:31):
Any weaknesses?
Greg Eyerly (10:32):
We have a number of weaknesses. Like so many utilities in the United States, you have the age of our infrastructure as being a point that we're all struggling with. Some things that make Houston maybe a little more unique when it comes to infrastructure aging and the resiliency of our infrastructure, we've grown by annexing other districts and other municipalities.
And so, we have 39 wastewater treatment plants and three major surface water plants. And then on the water side, we have not only aged infrastructure, we have several points of failure, single points of failure. So, we don't have the redundancy that we need on the water side for large transmission over raw water.
To make it even more difficult, what's unique about Houston in itself is we are susceptible to hurricanes. People don't often think about that when it comes to Houston, but we are. We get a hurricane here about every five years. It's been about seven since we've had one.
We also are obviously susceptible to drought. We have just come off a two-year drought. We deal with flooding. We were just dealing with flooding last month, tornadoes. We have tornadoes here. One of our treatment plants took a direct hit from the EF-3 tornado last year.
Ice events, we have had two major ice events here where Storm Uri took power out in some places for up to a week. So, we do have freezing and ice events here. To make it even just a little more difficult because it wasn't difficult enough, we are the center, epicenter, of the petrochemical industry in the United States.
We have 622 petrochemical facilities. That means we have pipe and railroad tracks, waste throughout our entire watershed for our drinking water. So, those are other challenges that we face that are weaknesses.
Mahesh Lunani (12:43):
So, what are the goals for the next year? And how are you measuring your progress towards them?
Greg Eyerly (12:49):
So, my big challenge is bringing awareness of these issues to both our elected officials, our partners in the community, the whole region, and trying to bring everybody together and get focused on what are our biggest threats to our infrastructure based on risk of failure and consequence of failure.
And it's easy when you have bad roads. You drive over a bad road and that, “Okay, that's the most important issues. We got to fix our roads.” It's easy also to get focused on water leaks because people can see water leaks.
And that's what currently the community's focused on: water leaks and water building. We've had some real issues with our water building. Those are the issues you see. But those issues are also at the very end of our whole infrastructure.
And they were only on the surface that they're outward manifestation of the same issues that we're having in our infrastructure that are below the ground. And the closer you get to our sources of water, and the closer you get to our treatment plants the consequence of those failures only go up because you're talking about larger diameter pipes.
And so, trying to get everybody aware and a focus of what our issues are and what is the risk of failure and what is the consequence of that failure, that is the biggest single challenge I have before me in the next year.
As far as just getting projects done, I have the consent decree right here. We're in year four of our 15-year consent decree. It lays out, not in the exact sequence, but it does lay out, here's what your priorities are and here's where you're going to go do, and we continue to execute the consent decree.
We've completed 62 different capital projects in the last three years. We are now moving into the rehab of our collection systems, upsizing, creating additional storage in the system. And so, just execution of the consent decree, that is what we are focused on this year, as well as reducing our water leaks.
When I took this job about nine months ago, we reached a high of 1,583 water leaks, active leaks. And presently we're around 900 and we keep driving that number down. And so, we'll continue to drive that number down until hopefully we get below around the hundred mark.
It's had a devastating impact on our water loss. So, how are we measuring our progress towards them? Well, like on the wastewater side with the consent decree, and we can talk about that more in a bit.
When I got here, there wasn't a lot of measurement of our progress with the consent decree. So, both staff and the people working on the consent decree, working for us in the private sector contractors, nobody was really aware of where we were. And so, we've established dashboards using Power BI on the wastewater side.
So, we knew what our daily production was for cleaning, inspecting sewers as well as manholes. And then we took that same technology, we brought it over to the water side, and now we're measuring the number of leaks we get a day. How many repairs we are making per crew. And so, we're trying to really get focused on just the very basics of repairing leaks and reducing water loss in the next year.
Mahesh Lunani (16:40):
Listening to see what kind of job you’ve got, I mean, it's incredible. It's a full-time job to train or educate elected officials on the preparedness of the infrastructure you're running and the resiliency that's required under drought, ice, hurricanes, tornado, you name it, you got everything going. So, it’s hell of a challenge.
And I'm really happy to hear, because if you can't measure something, you don't know what the progress is. And the fact that you now have metrics and a system by which you know exactly where you are and how much you need to dial up or dial down the effort, nothing comes in this sector without making big investments.
We are talking about billions of dollars of investments. What are your biggest investments in the next five years?
Greg Eyerly (17:33):
That's a great question. Obviously, the CD's driving a lot of that on the wastewater side. And so, the consent decree in total, it's around $9 billion for this consent decree. We just updated the costs on it. Those numbers are drying as we speak. And so, that $9 billion is going to be spent over the next 12 years.
And so, the rate at which we spend that over the next five years depends on how the project sequence so that you're looking at about $600 to $800 million a year just on this wastewater side of the consent decree.
Also, we have a project, about a $70 million project, that we're working on an oxygen plant for our largest pure plant for our largest wastewater treatment plant, the 69th Street Plant. That existing oxygen plant had two trains. It's down to one, it's past its asset life. We are in a race against time to try to get the new plant built there. And so, we hope to have that up in 2027.
So, a failure at that oxygen plant between now and 2027, there isn't a good workaround. And so, we are going as fast as we can possibly go to get that built. Our East water purification plant, we're in the early throes of a technical study to try to come up with a plan of how we're going to rehabilitate that plant and potentially expand it.
And we're probably talking about projects probably in the $1.5 to $3 billion range to do that and so, that's a major investment. And water line replacement, we have figured out that basically to replace 1% of our 7,500 miles is about $80 million. So, if we want to do 1%, it's $80 million, if we want to do 2%, obviously that's $160 (million).
Using AI, some AI modeling, we've determined that the worst 6% of our pipe- that equals about $480 million- the worst 6% of our pipe accounts for 67% of our leaks. And so, in the next five years, that's where we need to focus the money to replace pipe. So, if we can spend $500 million in the next five years, replacing the worst 6% of the pipe, we can reduce our water leaks by two thirds.
And why is that so important? Last year, we had a water loss of over 34 billion gallons. 34 billion gallons would support a city of a population around 900,000 people, which is equivalent to Fort Worth or San Jose, California.
So, you're looking at the 11th or 12th largest city in the United States, we could support that city with our water loss. So, that's why fixing water leaks are so important. Only way we can really fix them is not necessarily getting better at fixing leaks.
Yes, that's important in the very short term, but it's really replacing the infrastructure out there and doing it in a smart way. And that's prioritizing what needs to be fixed first.
And then if that wasn't difficult enough, I've touched on it earlier, our major transmission lines of water, raw water from our source water, some of those lines are 70-years-old. And they're built in 1954, so 70-years-old. Our East plant is 70-years-old.
Some of those transmission lines, we do not have any redundancy. And so, we can't take them down to inspect them, we can't perform maintenance. And so, portions of those lines go underneath our ship channel. And if we have a failure there, I can't tell you how long that fix would take.
And Houston supports 44% of petrochemicals produced in the United States are produced in Houston. Houston's port, the Port of Houston, is the largest port by tonnage in the United States. The medical center here in Houston is the largest medical center in the United States and one of the largest medical centers in the world.
And so, if Houston has a disruption similar or greater to happen in Jackson in 2022, Jackson was without water for a couple weeks, that's a city of about 120,000 people. If Houston had an impact like that or greater, we would all feel that.
And I'm trying to talk about these issues in a rational way and with some sense of calm, but I also don't want to understate that those types of issues are out there, we need redundancy. We need to put in additional water transmission lines.
And so, figuring out how we fund those in the next five years is very important. If you take our East plant water transmission lines and our first five years of, yeah … it's about $4.93 billion is what we need to really get started on addressing these issues.
Mahesh Lunani (23:13):
It's something, I mean, $9 billion for consent decree and then another $5 billion for the water side, especially the redundancy you need to build on the raw water side, the leaks, replace and repair and the treatment plant.
I mean, I can see, and I can feel while I'm talking to you, Greg, how strongly you believe that these disruptions whether for the petrochemical industry or the healthcare industry must be avoided, and you want to build a resilient and redundant infrastructure for city of Houston. I can certainly feel that while you're talking about it.
I want to discuss operational efficiency. You've been an operator yourself before, and I'm sure it's part of your culture and mindset on how you run the business. What are the operational efficiencies you're driving? What are the strategies and tactics you are instilling in your team?
Greg Eyerly (24:14):
That's a great question and I can't say it really came out of strategic thinking more than desperation of trying to meet the requirements in the CD. But we have deployed on a large scale, both AI and then smart manhole technology to deal with our collection systems and to reduce sanitary overflows.
And let me give you some metrics here. When I got here, we were cleaning and inspecting about 48 miles of sewer pipe a month, which sounds like a lot. And it is a lot. And then staff, we were using 280 staff hours to look at footage and scouring. So, we did 48 miles a month.
When we instituted AI, sewer AI to help us with the rating of our inspections, not only could they rate the sewer segments faster, but they could go faster down the sewers cleaning because they can capture the video quicker. So, our production went up from 48 miles a month to 77.7 miles per month when we instituted AI.
And staff hours went down, instead of having 280 hours of staff to do that production, we used only 90 hours of staff to get that production. So, our production went up and the number of staff hours used went down dramatically.
Since we've instituted AI just on the sewer inspection side, we've saved over 8,200 staff hours using just AI technology. Manhole inspections (are) even more dramatic. Before I got here, the number of manhole inspections we're getting done per month was 158, 158 manhole inspections per month. After using AI, that went to 2002 manholes per month. So, from 158 to 2,000.
5,700 staff hours saved using AI. So, our production went up and staff hours went down. When we look at reducing SSOs and using smart, manageable technology, we're around 2,500 smart manhole covers installed. We're going to get to 3,000 by the end of probably next year we're going to, the last 500 will be, where we place them will be pretty strategic.
But we've reduced our SSOs, I want to say, well, we've reduced our overall SSOs, but we've prevented, we believe over 600 SSOs using smart manhole technology as well as saved thousands of staff hours and not having to clean that up. Not to mention the impact on the community by not having an SSO.
So, using AI in that regard on the collection side to deal with the sanitary sewer overflows has been a game changer for the city. It's frankly how we have met our consent decree on that aspect of our consent decree.
Mahesh Lunani (27:41):
Well, that's quite few stats and quite few success stories. I want to congratulate you and the team on that topic. As a leader, you probably look ahead as much as you reflect on what happened. What are the big decisions that Houston Water must make in addition to things you've already kind of described, the resiliency in raw water pumping, maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. What are those decisions that they must make?
Greg Eyerly (28:12):
We are in kind of embarking on our one water plan, but the real big decision, the city of Houston and the whole Houston metro area on when it comes to water is Houston water itself. I mentioned earlier, we're the largest city managed water wastewater utility in the United States.
In the coming years, we either need to get a lot better at what we're doing, with how we're managed or look at a different way of being managed. And presently, we are a city department and we're managed up through the public works through the mayor and the council.
And that works but most utilities this size or even a lot smaller report to a separate board, a board that may have city electeds on it, but that board is focused on utility issues. And our council does a great job, but we have to deal with so many other issues, traffic, crime, all the issues that everybody's trying to face. And so, the governance of Houston Water is really coming to the forefront.
And another thing that makes that critical is, Houston itself is around 2.5 million people, 2.6 million people. We serve 5.14 million, so we're to that point where serving outside of the city limits versus inside the city limits is kind of shifting the other way.
So, the suburbs are growing more quickly than the inner city. And so, that balance will continue to be people outside the city of Houston are being served by Houston Water. So, how are they represented? Those are the types of decisions that need to be made. I'm here either way to do the best I can and serve the people that I serve.
But that is a key decision for Houston in order to really move on what are our other decisions. And so, if I look at water and wastewater, water in my mind comes first. There is no wastewater if we don't have water.
But the problem we have that Houston faces is the consent decree on the wastewater side, you shall do that. You shall do that. And the issue that creates pre-Houston on funding capital projects I mentioned it's around $9 billion. That's cannibalizing a lot of our current capital assets for planning.
And so, how do we address the needs on the water side when we have a consent decree saying, “You shall do this.” And so, those are key decisions that Houston's going to have to figure out how to fund the needs on the water side and meet the requirements of the consent decree at the same time.
And how does that affect rates? What other sources of funding are there? And so, I mentioned it earlier, Houston has a problem. Issues in Houston don't just impact Houston. If Houston has issues, it is a regional and national impact.
Mahesh Lunani (31:41):
These governance model you talked about, Greg, I've seen that happen. Detroit Water Sewerage Board during the bankruptcy, a regional authority got created called Great Lakes Water Authority that now has governance from multiple counties.
And even the governor, I believe, has a chance to appoint certain members of the board, to my recollection, or at least the county executives have. And that's because it serves 3.8 million residents, way beyond the city itself, where it's been a department in the past.
So, there's great success examples that City of Houston can look to on these new forms of governance models.
I want to switch the topic to circular economy. You did talk about the fact that there's no natural lakes, salt reservoirs, so the fact of recycling, reuse, recovering nutrients, generating gas, I mean all these interesting topics that we see a lot more in California, in Arizona and so on.
What's your take on that and is city of Houston embracing it, given the incredible amount of challenges you have in front of you? And how does this fit in?
Greg Eyerly (32:53):
I've spent my entire career saying with wastewater, we produce three products. We take your wastewater, and we produce clean water, we produce biosolids, or fertilizer, and we produce power. So, clean water, fertilizer and power.
In Houston, we don't do that. We don't have primary clarification. We don't have anaerobic digestion. And so, we produce clean water and we do produce biosolids. So, it's nothing but up from here when it comes to reuse and recovery those types of opportunities.
I also mentioned, we just are about ready to embark on our one water planning that'll give us the opportunity to go out and engage the community and start getting these ideas out there. We are getting ready. We're in the kind of planning phases of our first reuse project in Houston.
And that happened last year when a development came to me and they were looking to buy a small sliver of right of way into our wastewater treatment plant, so it'd make the turn into their community a little easier.
And I said, “Well, how are you going to water all your common spaces and all of that?” And they said, “Well, yeah, build city water like anybody else.” And I said, “How about we partner on maybe a reuse project where since you're going to be right next to the treatment plant that we can partner and use this as a demonstration project to reuse wastewater and help you with your community. And then that can maybe see the idea that we can go out and do more of these types of projects in the future.”
And then just on the whole discharge side of our wastewater treatment plants, the thought of, we do have some pretty large wastewater treatment plants that water goes just into the bayou and obviously makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico. We have all the opportunities to repurpose that water.
There's several ways we could do it. We could pump it in back into our reservoirs like they do in California. I just came from a project in the San Diego area, well, that's exactly what they're doing. And so, I think for Houston, we have just a tremendous number of opportunities to capitalize on reuse.
Now as far as gas production and power production, that is going to take a bit. When we have that opportunity to build as we go through this whole process of consolidation, my goal is to be under 30 treatment plants by the time I leave.
And as that, if we ever get a chance to do a greenfield wastewater treatment plant that will be the first anaerobic primary clarification treatment plant in the Houston area. It'll take that type of effort to make that recovery really feasible.
Mahesh Lunani (35:55):
There's so much. And so, yeah, as you said, you are at the ground level, and you got nothing but up to go in this space. Technology, you talked about great examples, AI et cetera, but what are you most excited looking forward that you feel these are the innovations you can deploy?
Greg Eyerly (36:15):
Sometimes, we're so focused here in Houston on just the basics that we sometimes have a harder time understanding how we can leverage some of those technologies. I would think digital twin and helping us better run both our individual treatment plants, our network of 382 lift stations, and being more efficient at that.
Also, how we deploy resources with the distribution system when it comes to both leak repair and replacement, I would say that is probably what we're looking most forward to. We've done some very extensive modeling on the distribution side.
I popped the question, “What if we get to 2000 leaks or 2,500 leaks? How do we maintain pressure in the system? Where in the system are we most vulnerable?” And we've done quite a bit of modeling on that, so we know where to deploy. So, I would say that's probably what I'm looking most forward to.
Mahesh Lunani (37:30):
And those are some exciting themes you just talked about. You had three decades of experience in all kinds of roles and in many parts of the country, primarily of the west of Mississippi for the most part. What advice would you give to an aspiring water leader?
Greg Eyerly (37:51):
I would ask them first, what type of water leader do they want to be? I mean, there's different forms of leadership and if you want to be like a technical expert, a subject matter expert, somebody that's really the best of the best in their field, that's a different route.
I ran into an engineer last year at WEFTEC, and he's somebody that works for Jacobs Engineering. And we went to Toronto, well to London, Ontario, Toronto area, to do some testing on UV for Trojan Technologies back in 1997. So, 26 years ago, we went up there to do this testing and that was for UV disinfection.
And so, I ran into him at WEFTEC and he's like, “Hey Greg, I've followed your career and it's amazing where you've gotten to.” I said, “Well, what are you doing?” And he says, “Well, I'm still doing the same thing I was doing 26 years ago. The same thing I was doing when we went to Canada to Trojan Technologies.”
He was running the session for that technical session for WEFTEC. He is an industry expert at what he does. He's the best of the best, and that is the career path he chose and that's okay. And he's 26 years with Jacobs. He used to be CH … then. And so, if that's the kind of water leader you want to be, that's okay.
And we have several of those types of individuals here in the city of Houston that are the very best at what they do. We have some great modelers; we have some people that are the best of the best of what they do.
If you want to be a leader that's a broader type of leader, somebody like me that's in the role I'm in, you have to be willing to be flexible. You have to be willing to move, probably. And you don't want to brand yourself or pigeonhole yourself and say, “I'm a this, I'm a wastewater person, I'm a water person,” whatever that is.
You want to be open to opportunities and take on challenges that at the time you may not be a subject matter expert but there are people who are subject matter experts around you that you can build as a team to address whatever challenges you're facing. So, I would ask an aspiring young person, what kind of water leader do you want to be?
Mahesh Lunani (40:21):
It's a great question. And you can be a technical leader, or you can be a business, a management leader, to your point.
Listen, I want to sum this conversation up. I mean, you built your carrier through a series of risks from being a lab to an operator, private sector, public sector, large city like Houston.
You have a real good take on how to run using performance metrics, asking the right questions really are part of the process for building the next generation infrastructure in the city of Houston that has a huge economic impact for the entire country and globally from a petrochemical point of view. And also, faced with the idea that what's the future governance model for this department?
And you shared amazing examples for AI and how it helped with your SSO reductions and main breaks and leaks. I mean, just threading the conversation up and just looking and hearing you, I think it's an amazing path and I hope you achieve all the goals that you set yourself before you move on to the next stage of your career, whatever that might be.
So, I want to thank you for being part of this session Greg, and I appreciate you taking the time.
Greg Eyerly (41:40):
I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Mahesh.
Voiceover (41:43):
Join host and Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani for another episode of 21st Century Water. Subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or Stitcher. Produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts.