Western Treatment Plant Explorer : Teacher Resources : Resource 4
Resource 4
A scientist's story: Lucey Alford ¹
In 1941, Melbourne Water (then the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works) employed Lucey Alford as a bacteriologist at the Spotswood Pumping Station. Lucey Alford, a graduate of The University Melbourne (in biochemistry and bacteriology), was the first woman to be employed by Melbourne Water as a scientist and she remained there until her retirement in 1974.
Lucey Alford.
During the years leading up to the Second World War, engineers working on the main outfall sewer running from Brooklyn to the Werribee Treatment Complex had become concerned about the corrosion of the concrete which lined the sewers. A research program located at the Spotswood Pumping Station was set up in 1939 under CD (Guy) Parker to investigate possible causes of the corrosion.
In May 1941, Lucey Alford was employed to work with Guy Parker as a bacteriologist in an effort to establish whether the corrosion was linked in any way to bacterial activity.
A part of the project required Lucey Alford to enter the sewers and descend into the tunnels to collect samples of wastewater and of slime found on the walls. Back in the laboratory, a small room high up in one of the two towers at the Spotswood Pumping Station, Lucey Alford and her assistants worked at identifying the bacteria.
Several groups of bacteria, including Desulfovibrio and Thiobacillus, were identified and found to be in a symbiotic relationship which involved the breakdown of sulfur compounds in the sewage to hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which then formed sulfuric acid.
Thiobacillus bacteria require both oxygen (they are aerobic bacteria) and sulfur compounds in the wastewater to survive. This limited them to the area of the sewer walls between high- and low-water levels. The sulfuric acid thus formed was the cause of the corrosion as it attacked the mortar in the concrete.
Accounts of the findings were published in several scientific journals, including one article in which the discovery of a new species of Thiobacillus, T. concretivorous, was announced. This bacterium caused quite a stir in the scientific community when it was demonstrated that it preferred to live in an environment with a pH of 2!
These discoveries must have involved the work of Lucey Alford, and yet no mention of her name appears in the scientific journals. The failure to acknowledge the part played by Lucey Alford was perhaps a reflection of a time when society did not encourage women in professional roles and so saw few women employed as scientists (soon to change with the outbreak of war). It was also a time when credit for work carried out by junior members of a team was occasionally claimed by the more senior scientist.
Lucey Alford was transferred to Melbourne Water's water-quality testing laboratories at South Melbourne. There she headed up a team of ten assistants who sampled Melbourne's water from the catchment areas to the consumers' taps, continually monitoring for the presence of pathogens.
Lucey Alford's original laboratory at the Spotswood Pumping Station is now a part of the Scienceworks museum complex, although the actual laboratory is closed off to the public. Some idea of the conditions under which people were required to work during the first half of this century can be experienced during a visit to Scienceworks and the Pumping Station.
¹ Based on an activity from: Stephen Blackwell 1993, A Drink to Your Health, Melbourne Water and Science Teachers Association of Victoria.