General Operative

I work Monday to Friday 7.30am to 3.30pm, except on a Friday when we finish at 1.30pm.  A team of us work between two water treatment works so where I work can vary (usually we do 2 to 4 weeks on each site).  What we do is very similar between the sites.  The morning starts off with us putting on our Personal Protective Equipment, then we get together for a few minutes with the Production Team Leader to discuss our job allocations for the day.

Before doing anything else we all do a routine check of the plant that we are going to be using.  The check is called a pre-use inspection record.  We have to check that everything is safe and working properly and then sign to confirm that we've done the checks. We use a range of plant in our work including, dumper trucks, mini diggers, sand skimmers and telehandler loadalls.

Different treatment works use different processes to clean and treat water ready for drinking.  At the sites where I work, we use slow sand filters as part of the process.   The filters are about half the size of a football pitch and have a layer of sand, then a layer of carbon and a top layer of sand to capture dirt in the water.  The top layer of sand gets covered in weed, so our main job is to take them out of service one at a time and drain them to clean off the weed.  It takes a team of us to do this.  One of us will use a machine, which rakes the weed from the filter bed (although we have to manually shovel around the edge to clean that properly) this is grabbed by someone else with a mini digger.   The next stage is to skim off the top layer of sand.  We do this with a machine which looks a bit like a lawn mower, but which throws the sand onto a conveyor belt to be collected up by three or four other Operators driving a queue of dumper trucks behind.  It will probably take us a couple of days to take all of the weed off and then skim the sand.

The next part of the process is to check that we've skimmed off enough sand, so we would do what we call a dirt test.    If there is still too much dirt, we will skim off another layer of sand before washing the sand in the sand washing plant.  When the level of sand in the filter bed gets too low, we will also need to put sand back in the beds, so will use the skimmer again, but with different attachments to level the sand.

As well as sand skimming, we get involved in other things: sometimes we help out the electricans or mechanical fitters if they need help lifting out or holding pumps; weeds can grow up on the outside of the slow sand filters, so we make sure they are kept tidy and if we ever get a bad algal bloom in the reservoir we may have to change where the water is coming from, this will mean a day of going to little outstations between the two treatment works to turn major valves.

At the end of each day we have to complete a timesheet to record what we've been doing.  One of the things I particularly enjoy about my job is that we don't do the same thing every day, we are all trained to drive most, if not all of the plant so we can swap what jobs we are doing and we are all multi-skilled.