John Bearden has ‘outworked’ a series of three top managers and is on his fourth at the Nehalem Bay Wastewater Agency.

On Sept. 1, Bearden celebrated 30 years as an agency employee. He is operations supervisor for the water treatment plant on Tideland Road in Nehalem.

The location of the treatment plant, among other things, helped keep him on the job for three decades. He likes the outdoors.

“You can hear elk whistling back and forth in the mornings here, you see a variety of birds…We see bald eagles flying out here…Last week, I came up the driveway and a porcupine chased up the driveway in front of me,” Bearden said of the environs surrounding his office.

Bearden started out as an operator in training and took over as supervisor within the past four years. He directs two employees, plus extra help in the summer.

What’s it take to stay on the job 30 years?

“A good job to begin with. We’ve had the freedom to run this pretty much as we know how to,” Bearden said.

The job changes daily, which has kept him interested. He appreciates the independence employees are given, a recognition of their competence.

Jim Noble, manager of Nehalem Bay Wastewater Agency, praised Bearden’s job performance.

“He’s been here a long time and he knows where every pipe, every lateral, every line in the system is buried…He’s able to deal with the strangest things that happen within a sewer system without being frazzled,” Noble said.

The job has its moments, Bearden admits. “It’s like any job. Some days you enjoy it; some days you don’t,” he said.

The treatment plant processes sewage from Wheeler, Manzanita and Nehalem, and when Bearden first started on the job, things flowed more slowly.

Growth took off in the early 1980s. His duties changed too. “The whole plant has changed. It used to be a pressure filter setup, and now what we do is pretty much keep everything in lagoons and let nature take its course,” he said.

In wintertime, the facility may pump from 500,000 to over 1 million gallons a day, depending on rainfall, and pumps 250,000 to 300,000 gallons a day in the summer.

When someone flushes a toilet in Manzanita, the effluence goes out the sewer into the main sewer line. Gravity pulls it to a lift station, and it is ultimately pumped to the treatment plant where it becomes Bearden and his staff’s problem.

“It comes into our primary lagoon…and then we slowly open one into the other,” he said. The sewage breaks down courtesy of biological treatment by microorganisms. From the final effluent pond, the sewage is pumped into a chamber or tank and chlorinated. Later it is dechlorinated before being dumped into the Nehalem River. In the summertime, the agency is not allowed to dump the treated effluence into the Nehalem River because of low flows in the river. So, the treated sewage is used as irrigation on 100 acres owned by the agency and another privately farmed 100 acres.

Bearden and his wife Connie live in Bayside Gardens. They have a daughter who lives in Alaska. A son died five years ago.

Away from the job, Bearden fishes and play golf. “That’s about it, other than working on my house which I’ve been doing about 27 years,” he said.