Oral History Interview

Interviewee: Darrel Andrews
Interviewer: Mark Olson
December 18, 2023

This is an oral history interview with Darrel Andrews, spanning his career here at the Tarrant Regional Water District from 1985 – present. We’ve got a lot to discuss. Let’s get started…

Mark O: Welcome to the new Oral History project we are launching at the Tarrant Regional Water District. The goal of this project is to feature water district employees who have spent much of their careers working here. It’s an opportunity for us to go beneath the surface and learn about some of the innovative projects TRWD has helped developed over the years.

All part of our efforts to meet water supply, flood protection, environmental stewardship and the recreational needs of the communities we serve, which at this point is over 2 million people across 11 North Texas counties.

Hello, my name is Mark Olson. I’m the Senior Video Producer here at TRWD. Today is Monday, December 18th, 2023. And our guest, first guest, is Darrel Andrews. Darrel serves as the Director of Environmental Services for Tarrant Regional Water District, which serves the Fort Worth area.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Geology from Abilene Christian University in 1984. He began with TRWD, which was then Tarrant County Water Control and Improvement District Number One, in 1985 during the construction of the Richland-Chambers Reservoir. His primary role with TRWD has been in the field of environmental resource protection. Even from the beginning, as he helped coordinate the challenges associated with preparing the reservoir site for inundation. That included a host of activities associated with the production of oil and gas in the area.

From that early beginning, the Environmental Division was formed in 1986 and he has helped to shape the role and responsibilities of that division and its focus. And so now welcome, Darrel…

Darrel A: Thanks, Mark. Good to be here.

Mark O: Alright. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started at the Tarrant Regional Water District, and what your role was at the time that you started?

Darrel A: My aspiration when I got out of school was to be an oil and gas guy. I got geology stuff behind me. And I was working in the business on a on a drill rig as a mud logger. And I knew Woody Frossard. And I thought, you know, they’re doing oil and gas stuff with a reservoir out somewhere east of Abilene, which is where I was. And so I called him and I said, ‘Hey, you guys have any need for somebody with my skill set?’

And he said, ‘Yeah, no, not at the time. He said, But come talk to us.’ So I came in and I talked. Ben Hickey was General Manager. I met with Mr. Hickey and Woody and some consultants. And that was that. We were done. And I went back home, back to my job and probably two months later I get a call from Woody and he said, ‘Hey, are you still interested?’ And I said, ‘I think so. Where would I be?’ And he said, ‘You know where Corsicana is? And I said, ‘No.’

So, I looked at a globe and found it. And my wife and I went out and visited with Woody and saw the Richland Chambers site. And that would have been 85, early in 85. And frankly, it looked like when we got there, it looked like somebody had built a high rise hotel out in the middle of nothing because the spillway was there. This is a big giant concrete rectangle. And the dam was being formed up on either side, but it hadn’t connected yet. So it was just this big concrete block.

We toured around and Woody talked to me a little bit about what all he was doing, looking for oil and gas wells and pipelines and those kinds of things. And it sounded like great work. So I said yes, and I think he gave me at least a three days to tell him yes or no. So I showed up for work the next Monday and we went to work.

And what was going on was there was some really old production in the Richmond-Chambers Reservoir bottom, production of oil and gas. Some of the oldest in the state. I think the earliest production that we were plugging in was in 1914. I think it was old stuff. Not as old as Spindle Top, but it was the second oldest oil field in Texas, if I remember correctly.

And so we’re looking for these oil and gas, some of the, some of the production was still there. And so you knew where it was, oil wells and gas wells, but some of it was abandoned long, long before that. And we had a great group of people helping us locate where those facilities were, where the old oil wells were. And we spent years going back into some of those old wells and making sure they were plugged well enough that they weren’t going to contaminate the reservoir. That was really the focus of those early years. And then the same thing with relocating and moving around some of the pipelines, oil and gas pipelines, in that bottom.

And for a kid from West Texas. It was interesting because big rain out there was not big rain in East Texas. I remember the first time I drove over the two cities, the old 287 bridge that’s gone now. It’s underwater, or dismantled. That was over the Chambers River or the Chambers Creek bottom. And it went from a little creek that was probably 30 feet wide to literally a mile wide. And I thought maybe this thing will fill up someday. First I thought, there’s no way this thing’s huge. It’s not ever going to work. But it did.

And so I had some experiences, some some challenges with East Texas mud and learned how to work and drive in those conditions and all those kinds of things. Those are some fun years. We got a lot of good work done

And that takes us through… We were, we were wrapping down in 1987, that time frame. That was about the same time that we made a closure on the dam. And what they what they did was they left an opening in the dam so that Richland Creek could still run through the dam. And until they closed the dam, which was done, I think in 87, November of 87, there was not a reservoir, it was just Richland Creek running through the bottom, running past this dam.

And Woody and I were in the office that morning and I and I knew it was the day was a big day. We’re going to close that… we’re going to plug that hole in the dam. The machines were out there. The dozers are out there doing that. And Woody and I were talking and I said, ‘Woody,’ I said, ‘that was that was Richland Creek yesterday. But today, that’s Richland-Chambers.’ And I said, ‘I bet nobody’s touched it yet.’ So we drove down there and got close enough to what was the creek right there where they’re closing and kind of jockeyed around the bulldozers and got down there and touched the reservoir for the first time. So that was that was a fun day and something I’ll always remember there.

So this is an 87 and I think it filled up a couple of years later. We had a lot of rain. When we were building the the thing, plugging those old gas wells, there was there was a lot of rain, very rain. But the reservoir filled up really quickly. In the same time frame… I’m oil and gas coordinator, I think was my name, my title back then. And I think it was 87. There was no environmental division, but there was enough questions and enough work that the powers that be up here in Fort Worth at the time decided we needed one. And Woody took over the lead role in that. And one of the first things we decided we needed to do was start a water quality program. Because we were, back then we were the water quality division as well as apart just from environmental.

But we underwent a study and decided, you know, if we’re if we’re going to take care of these reservoirs, we need a program that helps us assess the quality of the reservoirs. And so from those early beginnings, we started a monitoring program of the reservoirs that were 30 years into now. We’ve got three decades of data from those from those early beginnings – sampling reservoirs, sampling the the creek, sampling the rainfall, wastewater plants, those kinds of things that make up the water quality in the reservoirs. And as I said, that began in 87.

And so…

Mark O: Hold on. So you didn’t have an environmental division before this and you guys are just getting off the ground. Was it obvious to you how you were going to get all this stuff put together or did things just come together? Or were There are a lot of questions with no answers. How, how was it back then? Because I’m sure you’re just starting something brand new. There’s got to be a little fear factor involved.

Darrel A: There was for me, there was a good fear factor involved because I was the oil and gas guy, you know, I didn’t know… with any new program, there’s acronyms come along, right? And so I had to learn a whole new set of acronyms. I didn’t know what any of those things meant. And there was a group of Alan Plummer Associates back then, and they helped us come up with our early sampling plans for the for the reservoirs. And and that was really the group that made sense of what we wanted to do, from what we wanted and where we wanted to be. How do we get there right? Well, they helped us say, you know, this is what this is what a high quality program looks like. There wasn’t a lot done, the state was doing some sampling back then, but beyond that, there weren’t a lot of groups that were doing that kind of work.

So in those early days, we didn’t really have a plan, right? We knew where we wanted to be, but we didn’t know how to get there. So what we did was we’ve got some experts in the field. Alan Plummer Associates was the group that really helped us launch that, and they helped us formalize and formulate a plan of what water quality program really looked like. And mostly it was about sampling the reservoirs, the tributaries, the rainfall, all the stuff that that contributes to the the water in the reservoirs. And then how do you analyze that data? How do you take a look at the data once you have it?

30 years have gone by now and we’ve got three decades of data and it’s been really formulative for a lot of our programs because we can go back and track whether the reservoirs are getting better or worse or what’s happening with that reservoir. But those early conversations about water quality gave me enough education that I knew it mattered what we put into our reservoir. And I remember some of the first discussions that came, and this came from Alan Plummer himself. Some of those first discussions about what if we pulled water straight out of the Trinity River and put it into Richland-Chambers? And again, I knew a little bit about water quality, but I knew enough to know that the quality of that river was not something that you wanted to put straight into a reservoir. You needed to treat it somehow or it’s going to degrade the reservoir itself.

We looked at several different options and one of the things we looked at was the possibility of using a natural process, a constructed wetland, to let this water flow through and settle down and get cleaned up naturally, We did some bench scale analysis of three different methods in the wetlands won.

Mark O: Can can we back up just a second? So, what was the inspiration for Alan Plummer making that suggestion on pulling water out of the Trinity River and putting into one of the water districts reservoirs? What led to that?

Darrel A: The thought behind that Mark was that we can build another reservoir. That’s going to be a limited resource, but we could do that. Were there other sources of water out there that were untapped? And the concept of reuse of water was not really even talked about in the state. But the concept of reuse was something that worked for us because of our system layout. We’re pumping all this water up to the Fort Worth Metroplex, and it’s coming right past these two reservoirs, past Cedar Creek and past Richland Chambers. And so the ability to pull the water that we already had used, we’d already pumped up there and it had already been used. What if we could turn that into a big circle? So that we pull it back out of the river when it comes close to the reservoirs. Put it back in the reservoir once we clean it up and then send it back where it was used already, it’s reused. So that’s the whole concept of reuse that that was the the core for that thought.

Mark O: So you guys were in the process of trying to evaluate future water supply strategies when this idea sprung up?

Darrel A: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. And, and, you know, conservation was something that was talked about, as well. It was it was just the beginnings of those kind… Historically in the state, the construction of a new reservoir was how you answered that question. But those permits were getting harder, the projects were getting harder to build. And so people were looking for, we were looking for an alternative source of water for our customer base.

Mark O: So let’s talk a little bit about that permit for Richland-Chambers, because I think there was some mitigation stuff that was involved in having to build this massive reservoir that we needed to follow through on.

Darrel A: Right. Back in those days, it was more about replacing a given footprint with another footprint. There wasn’t a lot of habitat consideration given to it like there is today. Richland covered up pretty much 45,000 acres at the at flood stage of river bottom. And the mitigation for that was to acquire. And I think we’re right, we were right about 13,000 acres that we ended up giving to the state. And now as part of their wildlife management area program, the WMA program. But, that 13,000 acres, we deeded over to the state to mitigate for the losses that were created when we impounded the Richland Chambers Reservoir.

Now, we start this whole wetland thing and we think where, where might we be able to build a wetland? And the WMA is right there. And the WMA, this property that we gave to Parks and Wildlife as mitigation, it was perfect for a wetland! And so we we began conversations that took several years with Parks and Wildlife to get them comfortable with the idea that we might even be able to use mitigation property. Because once something goes into a mitigation that’s not a bank really, but for for Parks and Wildlife as part of their program, once it goes into their mitigation program, I guess you really can’t touch it. No one’s really going to do anything. They might develop it as a resource, but especially a group that’s in the business of building reservoirs might be looked at a little bit skeptically when we come and say, ‘Hey, we want to build a project on mitigation parcel.’ So, they partnered with us as we started looking in those early years about the viability of these constructed wetlands for water supply.

We cared about it from a water quality perspective, but they cared about it mostly from habitat and impact. Is it going to have a negative impact to the property? And so we for, I think was about five years. We had a pilot scale wetland project, a little two and a half acre project that was built on Tarrant Regional Water District’s property in the Forbidden Zone. And it worked out really well. We had really good results from that and there was no negative impact to the parcel, to the property itself. The soil was all fine. The plant community responded really well. And we entered into an agreement with Parks and Wildlife from there to build about a 2,000 acre wetland on the North Unit of the Richland Creek WMA, which was a big portion of the mitigation tract for Richland Chambers.

We started that project. We built it in phases. So no one had done this before and what we wanted to do was make sure that we did the right kind of science as we constructed that project so that we didn’t build it. We didn’t want to build some big mistake into it because we didn’t have anywhere, there was no case studies to go look at. So we started small with a two and a half acre system. Learned a lot from that about plant selection, about water depths, you know, what kind of conditions need to happen, need to exist out there to maximize water quality improvement.

So we stepped up from two and a half acres and we went on to parks on my left property with a 250 acre parcel or 250 acre wetland. And then we just went on from there over the course of the years. And that started in, I think the pilot scale started in ’92 and went through ’97. And then we began construction shortly after that on the 250 acre parcel. And that’s led us today to where the Shannon, the Richland-Chambers Shannon Wetlands is a 2000 acre wetland and it started production. And by production, I mean we started moving water up to the Metroplex in 2012, 2013 timeframe. And we’ve learned a lot of lessons in the course of that time enough so that we’re we’re using those lessons as now we’re designing and headed toward construction on the sister project to the RC Wetlands, which is going to be the Cedar Creek Wetland Project.

Mark O: So, from from your perspective, watching this project start off from this little tiny pilot scale, two and a half acres and seeing what it is today, which is nearly 2000 acres of this fairly pristine wetland habitat, I mean, what is what is the feeling like to see this project go from an idea of thought to its final completion?

Darrel A: So in all honesty, I thought Alan Plummer was crazy. There’s no way we’re going to put that river water into this reservoir. It’s not going to work. And I wasn’t the only one. This is when I was working down at the Richland office. My office was down there for 23 years. I very routinely got calls from the public and they would hear about it and they would call and say, What are you all thinking? Especially people that owned on Richland Chambers. They had a lake house there. And they thought we were crazy for doing it.

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot about wetlands. I’ve learned a lot about their resiliency. I’ve learned a lot about how, how they change over the, the the year and the years. They continue to be different. But one of the most interesting things that, to your question, that I’ve I’ve learned about it is that those natural systems just have a way about them. And if you can, if you can learn what parts of them you can harness for your own good, you’re going to have a really good project. It’s been a really good project. Enough. so again, that we’re, you know, we’re about to build another one.

It’s been a learning experience from skepticism all the way to to reality. I remember standing on the dam at Richland Chambers at the spot where one day there would be a big wetland outfall because we knew where that spot was going to be. It was just a road right, back then, a road and concrete. And I thought, man, I wonder if ever, I ever will see water going from that wetland into it. And it’s there. I mean, you can you can see it on Google Earth now. You can see the whole system in place and water cascading off into the reservoir. And it’s rewarding. Rewarding for me, but, you know, rewarding for others, too, because it was such a big team effort. People that have come and gone over the years that were a big part of that project, too. So it’s been a, it’s been a fun project.

Mark O: Yeah, That project I think was, when I started, was at that 250 acre phase. And so I’ve kind of seen it like you…

Darrel A: Yeah, you and I’ve been out there in waders.

Mark O: Amongst the water moccasins and the alligators.

Darrel A: It was not a water moccasin.

Mark O: It had slits for eyes. It was a water moccasin.

Darrel A: Whatever…

Mark O: And yeah, it’s just, it’s a haven for migratory birds. It’s just incredible to see the the wildlife that you can spot out there that probably wasn’t there before they came up until, you know, until they started expanding.

Darrel A: They’ve got to have water. They need their habitat. So it brought them in.

Mark O: Right. So that carries you through one of the most innovative water supply projects the country has seen. And now you’re you’re working up here in Fort Worth. What did that journey look like going from one of the, one of the best offices in the water district that you had, just like what is it, almost 360 degree windows?

Darrel A: There’s a lot of windows. It’s a great spot.

Mark O: Yeah. Back up to Fort Worth. So, what brought you back up here? What are you doing today? And what does the Environmental Department look like?

Darrel A: So the other big change that’s a big part of what I do up here was happening in in the years just… I guess really as we’re developing the wetlands. Because we begin to understand that, you know, we’ve got another water source and we’ve got the reservoir system that we’ve got. But as the environmental division grew and we started our analysis of the data, especially after that ten year time frame, when we did a trend analysis of our data, we could tell that there were some of the parameters that we measure – Chlorophyl A and the nutrient series. The kinds of things that are indicative of reservoirs that are in good shape or not. You know, if they’re trending up, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Well, we saw some of those trends happening and we began to ask the question of what, what are we going to, what could we do about that? We don’t own the… we own the reservoirs. We don’t own the watersheds. We’ve got 5000 square miles of watersheds that feed these systems. And do we have any hope to reverse any of these trends if it’s going to be a negative impact? Do we have any hope to reverse the trends?

And so we began to focus on how we could manage something that’s unmanageable because we don’t own it. How do you manage a watershed? Well, they’re for the most part, they’re privately held in the state. And so we went to the science, the university community, and and started looking at tools that they had in place to help us identify any areas of concern in the watersheds.

Where your high sediment loads coming from? Where? If nutrients are generally bad for reservoirs because they, they do the same thing that fertilizer does to your your lawn. It lets nutrients in a reservoir allow algae to grow, help algae grow, which is not necessarily a good thing.

So are there areas of sediment, high sediment load, high nutrient or those kinds of things? And those those computer models gave us a sense that maybe there was something we could do to help manage those reservoirs better. Or to help manage the watersheds better for the reservoirs. And that led to partnerships that are now 20 years old. Because we knew, we owned the reservoirs, we didn’t own the watersheds. But so who do the people in the watersheds trust? Right? There’s got to be people out there that they trust, and a lot of them are agricultural communities. There’s a lot of production, a lot of pasture and range and some cropland in the reservoir watersheds. And we began to work with federal, the USDA. State is the the soil board, the soil districts throughout the state, and then the agriculture community itself, the private owners.

We developed a mechanism to to generate a big partnership so that we could begin to have conversations about, hey, maybe, maybe there’s a better way to do, to manage the land that’s being managed. You know, there’s some good stuff that happens too, when you begin to have those conversations. Sometimes you’re… the private folks are hearing you say that, ‘the way daddy did it was wrong,’ and they don’t want to hear that. I mean, I get that. So that wasn’t, that wasn’t necessarily our message. But is there something that we could learn? And so that started our program of watershed protection in all of our watersheds. And we worked with, like I say, A&M, we worked with Tarleton, worked with several different groups to to help formulate those plans. And that was really before watershed protection became a thing. Now it’s one of the groups that we have working in the environmental division is our watershed group.

But back in the, so we’re in the mid nineties at this point. And there were some other watershed efforts going on nationally, but not, not a lot in Texas. And we began doing our own watershed protection planning, which again is a thing now. It wasn’t really back then. But that let us formalize a process where the district would put money in in the game. We would go to the individual farmers and ranchers and say, ‘Hey, if you’ll adopt some some of these practices that might be more protective, we’ll help fund some of those practices along with the state. And the federal money was there, too. So…’

That’s become one of our big environmental arms within the environmental division is our watershed protection groups. So that’s been a big change since I’ve come up to, I moved to Fort Worth in 2007. And the the jungle… I don’t know if that’s the right word or not… of regulatory and permitting has been a real challenge up here because you’re dealing with an area that’s not really black and white. It’s how each individual regulatory group or individuals within that regulatory group, how they interpret the regulations.

And so, coming up with black and white answers in a gray world is is a big challenge, but it’s a big part of what we do. I mean, some of these projects we’re looking at at new reservoirs and you’re talking about permits now that would be 20 or 30 or maybe more years to do all the work that would be be required to to come up. Like if we wanted to build a new reservoir. So that’s been a big learning process is that regulatory side.

And then we’ve still got our our group’s been in a way that’s, again 30 years ago we started that environmental water quality monitoring. We’ve still got that whole group that’s helping around the reservoirs and water quality and dealing with people that are, you know, have concerns. I’m at the bottom of my list.

Mark O: You’re at the bottom of your list. Okay. So along the way, there’s a lot of programs that are in play now that weren’t when you started. Were these ideas readily accepted? How did you go about getting some of these changes initiated?

Darrel A: It’s been a, it’s been an interesting process being part of an environmental effort here at the district. And this is why, Mark. And I guess the older I get, the more I realize it. But we really have been on the cutting edge of the science and technology for entities like us. I mean, from the from university perspective, I mean, those guys have been doing that kind of work and they’ve been putting putting people out in the marketplace. But from a group like us to have a really robust monitoring program… LCRA (Love Colorado River Authority) was doing it. But beyond that, I mean, and TRA (Trinity River Authority) some too.

We were the first group to have a watershed group. We were the first entity like ours to have a watershed group, a full time watershed group. There were a lot of folks that were kind of floating on grants and part time time, but full time staff on a watershed protection program. That wasn’t normal.

So being on the cutting edge part of it, in some ways it’s been it’s been a challenge to – not from a credibility standpoint. But if nobody, if everybody’s doing it, then everybody does it. But if nobody else is doing it. Nobody is doing it. So it makes it a little bit harder to uh, I guess, not justify, but to make that feel like a real credible, valuable effort.

I have had the chance to visit with colleagues throughout the nation. Our programs are not that different. Never have been all that different from some of the, some of the northern states, Especially if you get to the northeast and the northwest states, they, they they’re ahead of Texas from a regulatory perspective, protection perspective.

One of the big things that has been a focus here at this Fort Worth campus for the last seems like four years, so I’m going to say eight years, is this whole initiative we’ve got on green stormwater infrastructure. And why that’s important and is becoming more important, I think, is because of the population explosion in this area. And even in the short time I’ve been up here, the prairie between – we live in Weatherford – the prairie between Fort Worth and Weatherford, where it used to be Little Bluestem and Big Bluestem and Side Oats. I mean you’ve got all these prairie grasses. And you can imagine the buffalo out there. It’s shingles and concrete and bricks now. And if those types of developments are done with no thought to what they do to water quality, it’s going to degrade. It’s going to continue to degrade, especially impacts to that area, Mary’s Creek and the West Fork, Clear Fork of the Trinity River.

And so I guess maybe it’s just getting older, but I see the value in what we try to do. I was talking about green stormwater infrastructure. This campus is surrounded by it and it looks like, it looks like landscaping. And in some way it is, but it’s not. The intent is to develop for the future with an eye to what impact — How do we lessen the impact that we’re having on the environment around us? And so how water runs off a property, simple thing like that, is becoming a big deal. And again, I guess it’s because I’m getting older, but I begin to worry that, you know, 20 or 50 years gone by, it’s not going to, it’s not going to go real well if we don’t start thinking about some of those things. I sound like an environmentalist don’t I?

Mark O: Well, it’s kind of a balance, right? Because every community wants more people to live in their community to generate some sort of revenue, whether it’s for sales tax or other businesses or stuff like that. But if you don’t think ahead and try and alleviate some of the impacts that that could happen with the new development and all this population, then

Darrel A: Yeah, you’ve got to plan it. You’ve got to plan that kind of stuff in advance.

Mark O: Stay ahead of the curve to a certain extent, right?

Darrel A: Because it shapes your features, which shapes the features of a subdivision or, you know, some kind of retail complex or whatever. So

Mark O: So, based on what we talked about, I mean this is basically your workplace since you left college.

Darrel A: Yeah, 38 years now. 38 years.

Mark O: That’s, that’s tremendous. And so it’s really I guess in my mind, it’s wild that this is the place that you’ve been for your entire work life. How would you describe that? I mean, did you plan on that when you started or you know, what…?

Darrel A: Yeah, well, again, I was going to be a oil and gas guy, right? I was going to be a geologist and go find oil for oil production. When I got hired, it was for, specifically for preparing the land that was going to be under Richland Chambers for a reservoir. And that was about three years. So when I started, I thought, you know, I’m going to be here about three years. I’m going to work myself out of a job. But what a great, you know, it’s a great thing for my resume and and then I’ll move on and who knows where I’ll be.

I was in a meeting, probably two weeks ago, and there was three or four of us. And this to your question about the water district, I think between the four of us there, we had about 120 or 130 years of experience with the water district. But just for people. ‘that speaks volumes to me of the quality of of what this place is has been for so many years, for so many people that, I mean, life changes, people move on. I get that. And we’ve seen some of that even, you know, within our little division. But for the most part, this is a place that people stick to just because it supports the not just lifestyle, but the integrity and the… what’s important to the water district is what’s important to the people that work here for the most part. It’s, it feels like a big family. We care about each other and we care about the projects that we’re doing.

Mark O: That’s awesome.

Darrel A: Yeah. Yeah. And I tell people, you know how long I’ve been here and they’re surprised. A lot of them are surprised because it’s just not the way of the world much anymore. But it has been here.

Mark O: Yeah. And you know, like you mentioned, not just for you, for, for many others. Are there any words of wisdom that you would have for somebody that’s starting out here at the water district today in the environmental division or anywhere?

Darrel A: That is a great question. I mean, I’m old enough now that I see the differences in the, I see a generational difference in what’s im… importance is the wrong word. But the focus of folks my age versus folks in their in their twenties.

I don’t, I don’t have any great advice. I would say if you’ve just started here, you’ve found a place where people matter. And that’s really important. The importance of people over the importance of production is a big, big deal in this place is that. This place has always been that.

And that’s not to say that we don’t care about our product. We don’t we don’t care about producing water, delivering water and sustainability. Those kinds of things. But you’re, you’re in the middle. You’re surrounded by people that care about each other. And that’s not typical these days anymore. So, you know, I would say figure out what part of yourself brings the most value here and offer that up to, to the the group of people around you. Not to the company, but to the people around you. Because we’re all a little different. Some of us are a lot different, but we all provide the giftedness that we have. I’m doing stuff that I never imagined I would do.

I’ve always been my worst critic. You know, I still don’t think I’m qualified to do my job, but I’m doing it. So, you know, have faith in yourself and don’t be afraid to try.

Mark O: Awesome. Well, Darrell, you were the first guy that I reached to for this project because I feel really comfortable talking to you. I really appreciate your time today. And I just want to thank you for for being a part of this, helping us out.

Darrel A: Well, I’m honored. Thanks, man.

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