Across 50 years, Cindy Zatto has seen it all in the water industry. She has earned seats on the boards of several associations whose members developed new standards that were adopted by State Plumbing Codes, and she helped introduce valves that met those standards.
Now Cindy is retiring, and we talked with her about the highlights of her career, her work with Safe-T-Cover, and what she wishes everyone understood about the water supply.
Cindy started her career at ITT Grinnell, a company that dates back to 1850. Her first job was as a stores clerk in a 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Taylor, Mich., where inventory lived in two shelves of ledger books updated by hand. A single fire hydrant could be identified 13 ways, from the depth it was buried to the shape of the nut on top.
“You would just go line by line, meticulously. And at that time — seriously, I’m that old — that was my job,” Cindy jokes. Orders went out on a Telex, used before the fax machine became mainstream.
Purchasing led her to inside sales, inside sales led outside and, before long, Cindy was calling on engineers to introduce products they had never specified. Grooved-end piping, roll grooving, the Victaulic method born in wartime Europe, and the resilient-seated butterfly valve all passed through her hands.
“I’ve introduced methods of joining pipe in this industry [to engineers] throughout my career,” she says. The butterfly valve she championed is now the standard for 2.5-inch and larger. She came to see her manufacturer’s rep role as a translator between new products and the engineers who specify them. “Engineers don’t have time to [research and] see what’s new. So I gave them specific information for their type of projects,” says Cindy.
In the past 15 years, she has introduced a European piping material, PP-RCT, and its heat fusion welding method to engineers, contractors and owners. She’s recommending its use on a Safe-T Cover project currently in design that will relocate four water meter and backflow preventers above ground on the customer’s property.
Cindy began working with Safe-T-Cover in 2000. Ask her for a moment when the aluminum enclosure earned its keep and she goes straight to a Ford Motor Company property in Livonia. “They had a Safe-T-Cover unit installed, and a truck driver pulled into the parking lot the wrong way… and he crashed into the Safe-T-Cover enclosure,” says Cindy.
This semi struck a six-panel enclosure that was roughly 15 to 18 feet long, and the equipment inside was safe.
“Safe-T-Cover was able to rebuild the replacement panels quickly. The enclosure protected the backflow assembly and the water supply to that building. It did what it was supposed to do,” she recalled.
Over the years, Cindy has been a strong advocate for outdoor, above-ground equipment installations. That’s because she’s seen what happens with the alternative:
“An RPZ, when it does its job, is going to dump, and when it dumps it’s going to flood your building. That’s an application we can put outside now instead of the mechanical room, and let it pour out on the lawn or in the appropriate area.”
She makes the same argument for oil-water separators, lifting them out of the ground and into enclosures, from a 3-inch RPZ outside a fast food chain to an oil-water separator at a power plant. “People do forget they have these devices [when they’re out of sight], and this way they know they got it. It’s above ground,” she says.
Cindy has served on local boards at ASPE and ASSE, and she has attended state plumbing board meetings to present oil and grease interceptor products that received the Michigan State product approval. “ASSE used to print a booklet that listed all the standards and the names of approved manufacturers and their part numbers,” she says. “I would offer those booklets to engineers and contractors for reference as the plumbing codes adopted ASSE standards.”
She did much of that educational work as a rarity in the room. “Early on as a woman in this business, I was a lone woman at the ASPE and ASSE meetings in the ’80s,” she says. The field grew more diverse through the mid-to-late 1990s, and Cindy made a point of pulling people in. “One of the women that I nudged is the daughter of the initial founding president of the Southeast Michigan ASPE chapter.” A decade later, that woman told Cindy she got involved because of her nudge.
As she retires, Cindy wants the public to understand that the industry continues to prioritize water safety, saying: “I wish we would be more mindful of its value, its real value to life and to health. We need to protect it.”
Photo credit: Cindy Zatto