The wastewater treatment plant that led me to Our Lady of Guadalupe

Many of the engineering projects I worked on in the course of my career involved water or wastewater treatment. I worked on my share of sewage treatment plants, ranging in size from less than 100,000 gallons per day to over 500 million gallons per day, where I learned conscientious hygiene years before COVID.

But my specialty, the work I loved best, involved the treatment of industrial wastes. Over my career, I worked on projects involving industrial wastes from automotive (assembly, engine, transmission, foundry), chemical, pharmaceutical, food (cereal, soup, pickles, bakery, and dog food), tobacco (yes, wastewater high in nitrogen), foundries, and steel facilities, which meant I got to see how all those things were produced. How cool it was to watch someone make bumpers out of steel sheets, corn flakes from scratch, exotic plastics, medicines, rendering operations (don’t ask!), and so on. You can imagine that the treatment of those industrial wastes was as different as night and day depending on the composition (cereal wastes, medicine wastes, metal plating wastes), where the water was going next (more treatment, to rivers, to homes), how much water required treatment (a few thousand gallons a day, tens of millions a day), and many other factors.

In the heart of my career, my company was awarded the design contract for a brand new wastewater treatment plant for a huge automotive site in the Mexico City region. Consequently, I spent considerable time on that automotive site and all over Mexico City for almost five years. That’s how I met Luis, who was the client’s environmental engineering manager for that big facility. Little did I know when we first met that this relationship would become a warm friendship with unexpected gifts.

Plenty of larger-than-life characters were involved in this project, making the job both more challenging and more entertaining, from the corporation’s environmental chief who wasn’t above stripping down and wading into a watercourse to see things for himself, to the company’s dapper Mexico City purchasing manager, to our company’s forced “marriage” for this project to a big Mexico City contractor, to another good friend at the client’s Michigan HQ who became the most experienced industrial water expert in the world, in my opinion—indeed, he worked hands-on projects in every continent except Antarctica. More than once, Luis and I shared stories and grins about these characters.

Let me say at the outset that as close a friendship as we two developed, Luis always represented his company and protected its interests to the utmost. I had my duties too, doing the work well and conscientiously representing my company. Another important thing: while most of the treatment plants where I’d worked required incremental improvements, this site required a new treatment plant. From the back of the property, one could see locals using water from the canal into which this industrial site’s water flowed for a variety of household needs. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a water treatment project with so direct and immediate an impact on people… and not people of means either.

Luis was well aware of this and was as intent on this project succeeding as I was. Parenthetically, water was dangerous, even deadly, in urban settings right up to the twentieth century when innovative nineteenth-century drinking water treatment involving filtration and chlorination began to catch on, though some parts of the world are still catching up. Civil engineers may have had a greater positive impact on human health than any other profession, including the medical profession, by supplying safe drinking water and by making lakes, rivers, and streams cleaner and healthier. Recent popes have spoken to the limits of technology, but when properly applied in the service of humanity, technology can be a blessing, water purification being a prominent example.

Luis and I were both practicing Catholics. I stayed at a hotel in the Reforma District, where many business people lodged. Many mornings, I was able to stop at a small chapel down the street from my hotel before I set off for the factory site or a meeting in town. Naturally, the Mass was in Spanish—I was a better Spanish reader than speaker—and always less than thirty minutes long. At some point, a conversation with Luis sparked trips to churches around the city that he particularly appreciated. Inevitably, we went together to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, two or three times, in fact—viewed the tilma on a moving walk and attended Mass there. That was vast sacred space—a mixture of sounds and silence, devotion and curious tourists, people coming and going, along with a host of pilgrims outside. What an experience, made even more special by being there with a knowledgeable and gracious friend.

Perhaps some of those on their knees at the Basilica were our own “locals” who were scratching out livings on that industrial site’s fringes.

Apart from those spectacular experiences at the Basilica and Luis’s friendship, what else do I remember about those years?

The project succeeded because both Luis and I had strong, hardworking, talented teams. The traffic and smog in Mexico City were awful in those days. The old Cathedral was an easy hike from my hotel. I wandered about the Reforma area on foot quite often, not sure how smart that was in retrospect. I once found myself inside a cab that made me wonder if I would ever get back to my hotel. My normally ultra-careful right-hand man had forgotten the big knife in his travel bag. Fortunately, the only consequence was confiscation.

Luis took me to an old hacienda restaurant one night, which was one of the most memorable dining experiences in my life. I visited his home and family on several occasions, as he did my home when he was in the Detroit area for corporate meetings. We dined at one of my favorite places on the Detroit River and at a small cash-only hamburger joint with a nationwide reputation (no bill, you went to the cashier and told him what you had). Luis liked this place best of all. While in Mexico City, I squeezed in visits to Teotihuacan and the National Museum of Anthropology near my Reforma hotel. As impressive an engineering feat as the Mesoamerican (pre-Aztec) pyramids at Teotihuacan, what went on there in its time, human sacrifice, was a stark contrast to what goes on inside the Basilica. All cultures are not equally good!

For years after the project, Luis and I communicated on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the meaning of that event, and our memories of being there together.

Luis and I are both retired now, with fewer opportunities to see each other. I won’t be roaming as far from the hotel these days, I can tell you. In our heyday, we shared stories of sorrow and joy involving our families and lives, sprinkled with plenty of laughs. He used to complain that his English wasn’t very good; I invariably responded that his English was better than the vast majority of Americans I knew. Luis earned widespread recognition for his professional work, and we were both proud of the water work we did at that industrial site, but friendship and shared faith mattered every bit as much.

The lesson I learned from those times, have had reinforced on other occasions, was that work, friendship, faith, and culture aren’t supposed to be silos but are linked together to the degree the experience offers and permits. It is linkage, like wastewater, that can elevate all of these.