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The day I earned the title of “Crazy Cat Woman”
Once upon a time, in a faraway land…
Sometimes I’m tempted to believe it was another lifetime. And having worked in the health-and-safety conscious civil engineering industry in England for so many years I can look back on this, my first role on site, with a mixture of fondness and amazement. Nowadays I’d never get away with the one-woman rescue operation that’s the subject of this story without writing a three page risk assessment, if at all. Don’t think that we never considered H&S to be important though. We did, and the accident statistics in the industry in this other life were fortunately as small as the amount of paperwork it took to cover the risks. The question is: would I do this again, now, knowing what I’ve learned over the years? Honestly? Yes, she says with a sigh.
This is Zimbabwe. We’re building a fancy new biological wastewater treatment system adjacent to the old Firle Sewage Works. This system goes by the intriguing name of ‘modified activated sludge’ and we believe that the effluent it produces will be so clean that it can be discharged straight into a tributary of the Manyame River that will take it to the dam and the water purification plant and then back into our water supply. Sustainability — that’s what it’s all about.
