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Worked at Louisville Water since 2000
As Louisville Water’s supervisor of construction inspections, Wayne Whitehouse looks at project plans every day. Working at Louisville Water wasn’t part of his plan when he got a call from his friend, who was also an engineer at Louisville Water, encouraging him to apply.
Whitehouse told him, “I don’t want to go work at the water company. It’s boring, why would I want to work there?”
But he realized providing high-quality water is a necessity and the idea of job stability appealed to Whitehouse.
“I came in as a project engineer in 2000.”
As an engineer, Whitehouse managed a range of projects, everything from crews installing new pipes to rehabilitating or replacing older pipes while some plans called for new water storage tanks or booster pumping stations. He also oversaw a year-long project of rehabilitating thousands of fire hydrants.
He’s seen a lot of things in his 25 years with Louisville Water, but he says the craziest day on the job happened in his first year.
“I was out walking, looking for valves. I stepped on something, and my leg felt funny. I looked down and there was a snake. I was standing on a snake. It was trying to get away, but it couldn’t. After I ran away from it, I tried to catch my breath. I felt something on my leg, and I looked down, and it was still on me! It had wrapped around me. I kicked my leg and saw the snake go flying away. So, I always look for snakes now,” he chuckled.
Whitehouse’s background as a project engineer made him a perfect fit to lead the team of Louisville Water’s inspectors.
“When I got this job, it was probably the best move I made. It’s very involved with making sure our pipe goes in the ground right.”
It’s a job Whitehouse takes seriously, from hiring the right people to making sure they know all the right procedures and the technical specifications book.
“It tells them how deep to put the (water) main, what kind of rock to put around it, about the fittings, about the fire hydrants. Everything comes through my position and then I assign it to the inspectors based on who’s got what work, different workloads and experience, what type of project it is, so on.”
As you can imagine, installing new water pipes sometimes leads to unearthing cool pieces of history.
“I saw it in the throwaway pile, I grabbed it and hid it in one of our closets,” Whitehouse said about a 12-inch wooden water main discovered a couple of decades ago.
“They were using all the metal and everything for the war back in World War I. It was California Redwood shipped from California for the Army’s Camp Taylor.”
You can check out the wooden main on display at WaterWorks Museum at Louisville Water Tower.
From helping preserve history to helping invest in the future of our infrastructure, it turns out Whitehouse was right about finding stability at Louisville Water.
“When I got the job, I was happy, especially after my first year knowing that it wasn’t boring. I was happy and I thought I’d stay here until I retired.”
And now?
“Every day is the best day because I’ve got the best team.”
If you ask Whitehouse’s team, they’ll tell you they also feel pretty fortunate to be on the team with him as their leader.
