Daphne Kirksey proudly described herself as an unabashed “water geek,” and after her presentation to the Pachyderm Club, it’s easy to see why she gives herself such a label.
Ms. Kirksey, who formerly worked with Congressman Chuck Fleischmann and is now an external affairs manager at Tennessee American Water, spent the better part of half an hour talking about liquids.
According to Ms. Kirksey’s PowerPoint presentation, Tennessee was given a ‘C’ grade for drinking water and a D+ for wastewater, two letters that could stand to be improved.
She noted such grades were for the state of Tennessee as a whole, rather than just Chattanooga. Ms. Kirskey then mentioned how improving these scores would cost millions of dollars.
“Sometimes, mostly liberal-leaning folks think that water should be free and is a human right,” said the TAWA manager, “Well, everyone should be able to get clean water. But clean water has a cost to it, and wastewater has a cost to it too.”
As state Senator Bo Watson and some other political leaders sat in attendance, Ms. Kirksey then gave a brief history of the company. It was founded over 130 years ago, and since then has supplied clean water to Tennessee.
She spoke about how chlorine generation would soon replace the current, less efficient method of purifying water. Ms. Kirksey also discussed some of TAWA’s partnerships with other organizations. One of those partnerships is with the Drug Enforcement Agency and their “Drug Takeback” initiative.
“We don’t want people to flush old medications down the toilet,” said Ms. Kirskey, “because then those drugs end up back in our natural water sources.”
After Ms. Kirksey finished her presentation, engineering manager Kurt Stafford took the microphone and gave the Pachyderm Club an inside look into one of TAWA’s larger projects.
In 2016, one of two water mains that sent water to the North Shore area broke, and Mr. Stafford and his team had to work quickly to fix it.
He spoke of the lengthy process that ensued, including getting permits from TVA for both environmental and archaeological reasons. Then the speaker talked about how the pipe was fixed and another tap was also put into place.
These taps required the use of dynamite, and so Mr. Stafford closed his speech by showing the club a short video of the explosion, which was taken from land.
The ‘explosion’ looked like nothing more than a pile of bubbles from surface level, and the Pachyderm Club both laughed and applauded as the meeting concluded.