Incinerator Career Simply Flamed Out Wheelabrator Engineer Finds Himself Jobless In Dying Industry

Wheelabrator’s Steve Wotruba was a hero to his bosses and city officials when he began running Spokane’s garbage plant flat-out in 1992.

Spokane County faced an unexpected garbage glut, and plant manager Wotruba took care of it over the last few years by burning far more trash than the incinerator was projected to handle.

When the plant’s boilers broke last year, Wotruba wasn’t a hero any more.

Wheelabrator officials blamed their top man in Spokane for pushing the plant too hard for too long.

In December, Wheelabrator fired Wotruba after the company was forced to spend $3 million to replace heaters inside the plant’s two huge boilers and overhaul the turbine.

Now, the 49-year-old engineer is looking for a job - and finding that his industry’s extinct.

Nobody’s building trash incinerators any more, Wotruba said in an interview this week.

“The garbage incineration industry has run its course,” he said.

The reason is economics.

It costs roughly $100 a ton to burn garbage in a trash incinerator, including Spokane’s. It costs $40 a ton to haul that same trash to a regional landfill and bury it in the ground.

And landfill liners are now much safer, with leak detection systems and other controls to prevent environmental problems, Wotruba said.

Wheelabrator will continue to run the plants it has contracts for, he said. Fifteen years still remain on the Spokane contract.

It may build some small burners for industry, but it won’t be building big ones for cities and counties, he said.

Electricity deregulation also is contributing to incineration’s demise.

In the East, Wheelabrator was making big money off the electricity it produced while burning garbage. The profits were ploughed back into plant maintenance. But that cash windfall will disappear as electricity rates come down, he said.

Wotruba, who oversaw construction of the incinerator in 1989 and brought it on line in late 1991, got high praise for his management of the Spokane plant through 1995.

He stepped up to deal with the mounting glut of garbage that caught Spokane officials by surprise.

“Spokane grossly underestimated the amount of garbage it had,” Wotruba said.

The plant was able to handle much of the excess. Its roaring burners incinerated more than 300,000 tons of trash a year from 1992 through 1995 - far beyond its projected 248,000-ton annual capacity. In 1996, it burned 267,850 tons.

“This wasn’t philanthropy,” he said, noting that Wheelabrator made $30 a ton on the extra garbage.

But there were danger signs. In 1992, less than a year after the plant went on line, company inspectors noticed corrosion in the plant’s superheaters, Wotruba said. Soon, tiny leaks began to appear in the boiler tubes. Each leak meant a two-day outage for repairs.

“The deterioration of the facility was much quicker than had ever been seen before,” according to a recent city report.

Early last year, the problems accelerated. But Wotruba decided to keep running the plant, with major repairs planned for the 1996-97 winter.

“It was a bad call,” he said.

In addition to the $3 million to fix the plant, Wheelabrator also lost electricity revenues, and Spokane was forced to divert garbage to Rabanco’s regional landfill in Klickitat County.

Diversions usually average 10,000 tons a year. But last year, 30,581 tons had to be sent to Rabanco’s dump, said Damon Taam, acting director of Spokane’s Solid Waste System.

Garbage ratepayers didn’t suffer as a result, Taam said. “The costs for us were pretty much a wash,” he said.

But Wheelabrator fingered Wotruba for the company’s revenue loss.

“As the top man, I was blamed. I have no problem with that. I made the wrong call in 1995… I thought we could go another year,” Wotruba said.

In mid-1996, he got his first negative performance review. Bill Carlson, his boss and Wheelabrator’s Western region vice president, flew to Spokane on Dec. 6.

“I was fired that day. I called the staff together and then I left. I was caught by surprise,” Wotruba said.

Carlson declined to discuss the reasons behind Wotruba’s firing. But he said the plant’s problems weren’t all Wotruba’s fault.

“I don’t intend to lay all the blame for this on Steve Wotruba. It was a learning experience for us,” Carlson said.

“Maybe we were too aggressive in trying to accommodate all the needs of the solid waste system in Spokane,” he said.

In December, Wheelabrator scrambled to fix the trash burner. The repairs were supposed to take 14 days, but actually took 20, extending the work into early January, Carlson said.

“It was a hideous outage,” he said.

When workers opened the turbine, they found more damage to parts they didn’t have on hand.

“Then we couldn’t get them there due to the weather,” Carlson said.

Despite the bleak future for the incinerator industry, Wotruba’s still a defender of Spokane’s trash burner.

Under Wheelabrator’s operations contract with the municipally-owned incinerator, Spokane’s garbage ratepayers aren’t responsible for repairs. Wheelabrator is.

Mike Burt is Wheelabrator’s new plant manager.

Problems with tube leaks and the boilers will recur, Wotruba said.

“But Wheelabrator’s a lot smarter now. They’ll be taken care of in a more timely manner, and the garbage ratepayer won’t pay a nickel,” he said.

Carlson agreed.

“This is our problem. There are no sour grapes - we stand by the contract,” he said.

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