How to 'take care of business' when your wastewater treatment site becomes a flood zone

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay gave a shout out this week to a county employee who went above and beyond in the midst of area flooding. Tyler Stiltner is the senior operator in charge at the wastewater treatment site in Carnation. He told KUOW’s Paige Browning about what happened.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Paige Browning: You got stuck at your facility in Carnation. Walk us through what happened.

Tyler Stiltner: I was stuck for a period of time. Our operations are very important. We have a permit to uphold. We have the environment to protect. Everything that comes in here gets discharged to a wildlife wetland just a couple miles down the road. So, we want to ensure that what we're putting back into the environment is clean and healthy.

And we're protecting not only the wildlife, but the citizens around here. So, when we see the river projections that are looking to flood and the heavy rains, we try to be proactive and make sure that we're here on site. The plant is not staffed 24/7 so were something to come up in an emergency situation in the middle of the night and the roads were flooded, we wouldn't be able to respond. So, we just make the conscious decision to be here and wait it out and take care of business.

Say more about what happened during the atmospheric river, when we started to see flood waters around the region.

The Snoqualmie was rising. The Tolt was rising. Essentially cutting off all means of entrance and exit to Carnation. Luckily, I was here on site. We're what's considered a smart treatment plant. It's mostly automated but does require some operator intervention to keep things going smooth. As with most automated things, power interference is its biggest enemy.

With multiple power outages, we saw the havoc that is wreaked on our equipment during those flood times. There's a lot of equipment that had some issues, and I was able to get everything remedied and put back into service. With that, we were able to avoid any kind of interference to what we were discharging and keep the plant up and running.

Even though it's automated, I am staffed out here Monday through Thursday. I spend 10 hours a day, and then I'm up here on the weekends. Aside from monitoring the plant and being the remedy to any kind of equipment failures or process failures, we do have a lot of laboratory analysis and sampling that we do throughout the week that is required by the Department of Ecology. So that does require somebody to be on site.

I saw images of you at the facility and of the site itself, where the roads coming into it are covered in water. How long were you unable to actually leave?

I was here from Monday evening until early Friday morning. There was probably a means of exit early in the Monday-Tuesday area, but Thursday through Friday morning, there was no way to get in and out.

Were you totally isolated for the week you were there? Or did you have contact with other people nearby?

I had contact with the cashier at the grocery store. Luckily, we were only about 200 yards away, so I was able to keep the fridge stocked and keep myself fed throughout the night.

What did you buy at the store? What did you end up eating while you were stuck at the treatment plant?

Oh, man, it was nothing fancy. Anything I could throw in the oven, pizzas, Hot Pockets, the essentials. [laughs]

Okay. Could be worse, you had an oven on site. You seem to have a very positive perspective on this whole thing, that you got to be there so that you could monitor things.

Yeah, it's not a bad experience. It's a great job. It's a great thing that we're doing, you know, cleaning the water, protecting the environment. So, it's something I'm passionate about, and I'm happy to do it.

Was there any moment where it felt kind of scary to you?

I wouldn't say that. From the treatment plant standpoint, we were relatively safe. We did see the flood waters come inside our fence line from the rear, where the Snoqualmie kind of borders us. The uneasy part is kind of driving around and assessing the rest of the neighborhood, and you see the locals that didn't quite have it as good as I did at the treatment plant, the houses that were flooded, cars, just collateral damage. You really feel for them, right?

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.