BETHEL – In a Bush town where living often is rough, a shortage of Bethel city truck drivers, mechanics and trucks themselves for weeks has disrupted delivery of one of the basic necessities: water.
City officials said this week that with overtime and extra shifts, a real disaster was averted and water deliveries are finally caught up. Sewage removal from holding tanks should be back on schedule by Saturday. Only a few people reported they ran out of water or saw their sewage tanks overflow with brown liquid, according to the city. Others may have toughed it out without calling in.
The near-crisis underscores the importance of the big trucks with silver tanks that rumble daily down Bethel's streets to bring water to homes and apartments, stores and restaurants, office buildings and residential treatment centers. Red-tanked trucks haul away the sewage.
This system -- unusual in a community of this size, with 6,300-plus residents -- is how most of Bethel is able to flush toilets, take showers and wash clothes. Out of about 1,600 city utility customers, more than 1,200 rely on what they call hauled water. Fewer than one-fourth are served by an above-ground piped system. Some big institutions are on their own wells.
The structure depends on drivers, specialized positions that are hard for the city to fill with Bethel's small labor market, but one of the most vital jobs in town.
Water truck driver is right up there, "next to being a doctor," said Jim Colonel, foreman of hauled utilities for the city. The city is having trouble filling other jobs too, including police officers and a financial data specialist, which has been open a year, said city manager Ann Capela.
The recent troubles began Dec. 23 when a water truck rollover crash put both the truck and the injured driver out of commission, said Muzaffar "Zef" Lakhani, director of Bethel's Public Works Department. A couple of other drivers quit. Suddenly, the city had three openings for drivers, plus others off work for family emergencies, sick leave and vacation.
On a normal day, with full staffing, 11 drivers are on the road covering water, sewer and garbage routes and, ideally, two more are driving around to pick up trash that spills around dumpsters, Colonel said. (In Bethel, there's no curbside garbage service. Everyone tosses trash into dumpsters that the city empties.)
During the worst of the crunch, just six drivers were trying to cover 10 to 11 routes, Colonel said.
To catch up, the city ran crews seven days a week, including Christmas Day, New Year's Day and recent Sundays. Two shifts of drivers worked Wednesday. Some collected 50 or more hours of extra work during a two-week pay period, meaning hundreds of dollars in overtime pay but also little free time.
"They are exhausted," Lakhani said of the drivers.
Melting snow
The city has been urging residents to conserve water and to call 907-543-2023 for help if they are out of water or have a full sewage holding tank. The city will send out a truck as quick as it can, Colonel said.
It's not always fast enough, by some accounts.
Brenda Green said her water is delivered on a less expensive schedule of every other week, and she manages it so that her family normally uses almost all of it. She buys bottled water for drinking but her city-supplied water tank went dry last Saturday, on Jan. 16, her normal delivery day.
She couldn't get anyone on the phone over the weekend. On Monday morning she found an emergency cell number on the city website and texted it after no one answered. Someone texted back that there had been a lot of missed houses and she might not get her delivery until the next day.
"I melted snow to flush the toilet and used our drinking water to fill a basin in the sink to wash our hands," Green said in a Facebook message. She and her two children all ended up feeling sick from not drinking enough and eating processed food all weekend, she said.
Her water was delivered Monday night. It was a frustrating experience, but she said she was glad to get the water on a holiday.
Life of a driver
Driving a water or sewer truck is a grueling job that some take to and others burn out on fast. Drivers must climb steep steps in and out of big trucks all day, every day. They drag heavy hoses and knock ice off frozen pipes. They back up in the pitch dark past brush and snowmachines, basketball goals and pickups, dogs both loose and tied, old gear left in the yard. Just controlling a big truck on an icy road with wind blowing can be hard, drivers say. They get stuck in ditches and occasionally wreck.
"This job picks you," said Jonathan Phillip, a driver for 10 years who has switched over to road maintenance.
Lisa Paul, 30, has been driving for three years. Though she's just 5 feet tall, for her the big water truck is a good fit. Colonel said she's one of his best drivers.
One day recently in the office, where workers get their routes and where most punch in at 7 a.m., she told Colonel she was giving her notice. He was startled, until she finished her joke, that it was 17 years notice.
She said she loves the job, being active and working outside, but early on she wanted to quit. Workers must get to each house quickly. When you're new, it's hard to find houses in a town where most roads don't have street signs and not every place has an easily visible number. Some water connections are in weird spots, under decks, around the side, even under the house. Friends motivated her to stick with it. Three months in, she says, she knew her routes and her truck.
She grew up in Eek, with Yup'ik as her first language. Her Yup'ik name, Anvakalria, is tattooed on one forearm. It means someone who is always outside, she said.
On Thursday, she had 39 tanks to fill. But some days, when other drivers are out, her log sheet may have 60 or more addresses to mark off.
"We just move on and go down the road," Paul says as she tops off the tank in one house and heads to the next.
Frozen pipes
In summer, bugs swarm. Winter brings its own challenges. Paul wears rubber gloves that keep warm on the dashboard between stops, black bunny boots with cleats, and insulated Carhartt overalls with pockets that she patched with blue jean material.
It's not just trying to stay warm. She also worries constantly about flooding homes. Water tanks aren't metered, so the only surefire way to tell when one is full is when water starts pouring out of the overflow pipe, which typically sticks out the side of a house, next to the fill connection. But if the pipe is frozen, the water spills inside instead. Carpets and everything else can get soaked.
She aims her headlamp to check pipes for ice and snow and taps them with a metal tire chain tool to loosen frozen chunks. She puts her ear close to listen for the splash of pumped water hitting the tank.
Paul relies on a stopwatch to gauge when the end is coming. The water should pour in at a rate of 100 gallons a minute but most of the city's old pumps run a bit slower. A small tank might take just three or four minutes to fill. A big one, holding 1,000 or more gallons, might take nine minutes or longer.
"This next one is interesting," Paul says, backing up carefully to avoid the residents' vehicles. She slid into a house Sunday despite the heavy chains on her tires, a minor accident. Nothing was damaged too seriously, others said.
When a pipe is frozen hard, she leaves a blue tag at the door with a note saying the water truck will return when the pipe is thawed.
Paul tugs on a rope to open the lid of her truck tank to fill it with water from a city pump station. But sometimes it sticks and she has to scamper on top of the truck to free it.
At one house, she is happy to see heat wire around the water pipe.
"That makes me feel safe. No floods," she said.
Tougher standards
The city used to employ 23 water, sewer and garbage truck drivers, plus an office manager and office assistant, Colonel said. Those administrative spots have been cut and so have some of the drivers. Now there's 18 funded driver slots, 15 of them filled, counting Colonel, who drives as needed on routes.
"Technically, I'm 10 guys short," said Colonel, who has been with the city for 13 years.
One driver lives in the nearby Kuskokwim River village of Kwethluk and commutes by boat in summer and snowmachine in winter, Colonel said. But one who just left wanted to return to his home village and another quit to be with family in Anchorage. A new hire, from Newhalen in the Bristol Bay region, just started.
The city is speeding up background checks for prospective drivers and working with Yuut Elitnaurviat, or the People's Learning Center, a vocational school in Bethel, to train and license them.
It's tougher to earn a commercial driver's license in Bethel than it used to be. The Bush community is cut off from the U.S. highway system, so it long was exempt from a federal requirement that commercial drivers pass a challenging skills test. They only had to pass a written test. But traffic on Bethel's main roads is now heavy enough that it lost the skills test exemption a few years back.
Byron Maczynski, a Bethel City Council member who serves on the public works committee and has an auto shop, said he believes the city should concentrate on filling the open driver and mechanic positions, and should raise the starting pay to ensure they are competitive.
"Right now we don't need to expand our positions for drivers," Maczynski said in an emailed response to questions. "We just need drivers and mechanics to fill the positions already there."
Maczynski said city benefits -- health insurance, paid vacation and discounts on water service -- are excellent, but the pay may need to be adjusted for inflation to ensure the job remains attractive.
Starting pay for city truck drivers just increased to more than $19 an hour, and longtime drivers are making $33 to $35 an hour, plus time and a half for what has been extensive overtime, Lakhani said.
Yuut in 2013 started offering commercial driver's license training and testing to help Bethel drivers pass the newly applied skills standard.
If the city -- or any employer -- provides a letter of intent to hire a student who completes Yuut's six-week CDL training course, a state grant will cover $4,000 of the $6,000 tuition, leaving just $2,000, said Jeremy Osborne, Yuut's director of programs.
The next class starts Feb. 8. As of Friday afternoon, a couple of spots were still available. Potential students can check with driving instructor Gerry Graves at 907-543-0978.
Another step forward came Monday. The City Council in a special meeting agreed to spend $258,000 on a new water truck. The city fleet of water and sewer trucks is aging, and trucks often end up in the shop. There aren't enough mechanics, either, just three when there used to be five, Colonel said.
The city had to take quick action because the truck manufacturer needs 210 days of lead time, said Capela, the city manager.
If the order is put in by Feb. 1, the truck should make it on the last barge of 2016, in September.