ROANOKE, Va. (AP) - Are you listening Hollywood? We’ve got your next feel-good blockbuster all cued up.
It’s got all the elements of a dramatic, can’t-look-away underdog tale - the team of hardworking, unassuming competitors who emerge from an obscure town shock their rivals on the biggest stage.
It’s a lot like Hoosiers. Only it’s about sewage treatment.
The town is Roanoke, and the team is the Western Virginia Water Authority’s Blue Ridge Brawlers, the newly crowned national champions in the annual Operations Challenge hosted by the Water Environment Federation in New Orleans.
The four Brawlers and their coach bested 41 other teams from across the United States, as well as Canada and Argentina, in a five-event competition of troubleshooting and management practices for wastewater treatment plants.
It’s a pentathlon of poo.
The competitors take it seriously.
“We’re national champs. That’s the bottom line,” said team captain Lacy Burnette, an ex-football lineman cum lab tech and hole saw whiz.
The Brawlers formed six years ago at the authority’s plant in southeast Roanoke at the behest of the water authority management, and have made five trips to the national competition. They failed to qualify once, and made their best finish at second place in Division II of the contest in 2013. Last year they moved to the top division and came in fourth.
That was hardly satisfying for the quintet, each of whom has a specialty they bring to the team, like a band of superheroes each with a superpower.
Burnette is the lab guy. Wayne Brown knows plant operations. Stephen Lofaro is an industrial programmer. Kevin Thomasson is the electrician. Coach Randy Williams is a maintenance technician.
But each member must compete in each of the events, which demand skills from complicated mathematics, laboratory operations, equipment maintenance, rescuing a downed worker and repairing an 8-inch pipe while it’s still in use.
During high season for competition, the Brawlers come in early, stay late and use their lunch hours to practice their skills.
Precision is key. The events are timed, but even the tiniest error - filling a beaker to 9.92 milliliters instead of 10 - can trigger a costly penalty.
“The competition makes us better at our jobs,” the coach, Williams, said.
“It makes you aware of how each other operates,” said Brown.
“It makes you look at your job and do it as efficient as you can,” Lofaro said.
Each of them described bringing a method or knowledge to their work that caught on with colleagues.
“It’s good for the company. It’s good for the community,” Thomasson said.
It’s also serious competition.
The Brawlers love the camaraderie with their competitors - with no smack talk or side bets.
All they win, after all, is pride and a guaranteed entry in the next year’s competition.
Yet the teams scout one another during competitions that lead up to the national championship. The Brawlers won three challenges in Virginia and beyond on the way to New Orleans this year. In Maryland, teams from the West Coast came just to watch the teams they would meet in Louisiana.
The Brawlers had earned a rep for their particular expertise in the “collection” event - repairing that leaky pipe. They were posting almost unheard of times in the range of 70 seconds.
“We’d heard it could be done,” one competitor from New Jersey told Williams in Maryland. “We’d never seen it.”
“Our bull’s-eye has gotten huge on our backs,” Burnette said.
Coming into the national finals recently, their expectations were high. They were undefeated and hadn’t finished below fourth in any single event.
In their first day of competition, they tackled the “process control” event, which is basically a team math test, and the laboratory event.
Competitors don’t know their full scores or the standings, but nobody felt they’d done their best.
“None of us was very happy,” Thomasson said.
Williams pepped them up. “We’re in the hunt,” he assured them.
The next day began with the maintenance event, in which competitors change the oil and filters and perform other maintenance on a pump.
That boosted their confidence some.
In the safety event, the Brawlers smoothly rescued the dummy overcome by gas in an underground vault, but suffered a one-minute penalty when the toe of Brown’s size 13 boot momentarily slipped over the lip of a manhole. As it turned out, many teams were hit with the same penalty. And indeed, the team suffered penalties in every event.
“We’re not feeling like a top three team” at that point, Thomasson said.
They still had one event to go, and it was their strength - the collection event.
But they trailed first place by 20 points - a huge margin in a competition often won by a point or two.
Individually and collectively, they decided they had nothing to lose, and that they would play for respect, if nothing else.
As they took their places, the crowd around them was four deep, Burnette said. Many held GoPro cameras mounted on selfie sticks.
In a video of the event, the Brawlers’ intensity is belied by their calm. Each man knows his role, timed to the second. In a kind of industrial ballet, each time one finishes a task and turns away, another steps into his place to begin the next task.
That’s their secret, they said. Each completely trusts the others to know their roles and start and finish on time. Not a second is wasted.
“It’s almost like artwork,” Thomasson said.
Most of the other teams had posted times of 100 seconds or more. By the time the Brawlers laid down their tools, only 74 seconds had elapsed - a second faster than the fastest time ever, but they were assessed a three-second penalty, pushing their final time to 77 seconds.
Still, it was 17 seconds faster than their nearest competitors, who watched with mouths agape.
Burnette recalled the Argentinian team’s excitement.
“I don’t have a clue what they were saying, but they were impressed,” he said.
After that, all the team could do was wait. Most thought they hadn’t done enough to finish in the top three, let alone win.
“We sat and marinated on it for five hours,” Burnette said.
Finally, the winners were called. A Los Angeles team, the LA Wrecking Crew, came in third. The Maryland team, the Motley Poo, was second.
That had the Brawlers thinking they’d not broken the top three.
But they’d won it all. That gap of 20 points? They’d closed it, plus two.
A few years ago, the team finished second in Division II by two points.
“Now what we know what it’s like to win by two,” said Burnette. “And the feelings aren’t even close.”
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Information from: The Roanoke Times, https://www.roanoke.com
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