'You Have the Ability to Kill Somebody for Lack of Caring'
The Enormous Responsibility of Every Engineer
By Mark Pestrella, Director of L.A. County Public Works
What keeps the director of Los Angeles County Public Works up at night? Managing an annual budget of $4.4 billion? No. Serving over 10 million people across 4,000 square miles, representing 88 cities, and over 120 unincorporated communities? Close, but not quite. Do the people he and his department serve trust them? Bullseye.
Mark Pestrella has led the largest municipal public works department in the country for the last 37 years. He ends every night with the question, “Did I earn their trust?”
On March 6, 2024, Pestrella spoke to hundreds of engineering students on the essential role of engineers in our society. Below are the most compelling excerpts from the hour-long lecture, where he impressed upon the young audience the value of cultivating trust and the tremendous responsibility engineers wield in the flourishing of everyday life.
I’m Telling You Exactly What You’re Going to Do with Your Engineering Talents
Infrastructure, the built environment, is in every part of our lives. It’s the simple things, like getting to work safely or how about more importantly, getting our children to school safely. Or even more importantly, being able to get to fresh food without having to take three buses? Or frankly, not being polluted by our own infrastructure and our own designs? Infrastructure is not just the roads, it’s buildings and bridges. It’s the very underpinning of society. If you look at any society, the ones that have made it, you can tell the quality of life of that society by the quality of the infrastructure that’s serving that society.
Think of the Romans. It wasn’t built overnight. It took a long time to build that infrastructure. If you’ve been to Rome, it’s incredible—all the waterways, all the civil engineering wonders of the world—they’re all there. But they were building with a lot of slaves for a certain sector of society. The underpinning of that society was the infrastructure serving the people, but because it didn’t serve everyone, it collapsed on itself.
Infrastructure must be built for all if we’re going to have a society that can be sustained. That’s why today, I’m talking to you about your responsibility because you were born with some intelligence. You can do math. You can’t get into Cal Poly Pomona without doing math, right? No one paid your way in here. You had to earn your way here.
All of you have something in common when you first walked in. You’re students, you’re eager and you’re smart about math and science, but you have a lot to learn. You’re learning on a journey right now about what it is to be a human being in the world. Like growing up at the same time while in college. You chose to go into a major that has a major effect on society. What comes with that education is the knowledge of how things work and how to solve problems.
You’re probably one of those problem solvers if you got into Cal Poly Pomona and I’m going to tell you what you’re going to do with this skill.
You’re going to fix problems for society. Society is going to demand, even if you go to the private sector, that the stuff you’re going to be working on serves human beings.
This is such an important message that engineers need to hear because engineers have the power to help or to hurt. They really do.
And that’s what we’re talking about today. The importance of an engineer in society and the obligation to treat people well. If done right, we have the ability to make profound differences in people’s lives. There was a project I worked on where we built housing for people experiencing homelessness. We were told, “You guys are really smart over there. You can figure this out. You’re going to build 230 units in six months for this much money [Pestrella puts his index finger and thumb close together to express the miniscule budget].” What a challenge. We built it in six months for this much money [Pestrella holds out his hands, roughly a foot from one palm to another, to express that ultimately, they went over the initial budget]. But, we built it, and we built it with gusto, with all our minds and our absolute commitment to help people.
People stayed up all night. 24 hours. Inspectors, designers, constructors, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical people, geologists, soil engineers. The Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, a good example of us making a difference in people’s lives. The great thing about my job is I get to be there when they cut the ribbon, but more importantly, I get to be there to greet the first resident from Skid Row. People who have lived on the street for 30 years. First roof over their heads in a civil engineer-designed structure.
You Have the Power to Hurt or Heal
The other thing that we obviously affect are all these other natural resources like water, for instance. Water being life. I tell my waterworks people every day, “You have the ability to kill somebody for lack of caring about what’s going on with that water.” Everybody heard about Flint, Michigan. Those were engineers who decided to save some money and let the water run through a lead system.
One of the most heart-wrenching things for me as an infrastructure agency lead was to watch someone come on TV and say, “I can’t have my family here for Thanksgiving because the water is brown. I am afraid to give this to my children. I will not serve it. I will not have my family here.” Heart-wrenching. Now, the beauty of my job and the beauty of your jobs is we actually do something about it. Engineers can do something about it. We got busy buying that district for $1 million. That was like a drop in the bucket.
But someone had to have the courage, the civil engineer had to have the courage to go to the elected officials and say something has to be done and that this is unacceptable. So, we made a difference. And we took over that district, and I took really smart engineers, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and accountants, our human relations folks. We built trust with the people of the district, we fixed the infrastructure—the pipes, the broken loop systems, flushed the brown magnesium out of the water, and made sure to not overbuild the system so people in this district wouldn’t have to choose between paying the water bill and paying for food. We made a difference. It’s a good example of when we have to correct what is wrong. And we step up because engineers know better.
Why am I saying this to all of you? Because you dare to be an engineer to solve problems. You’re in the major you chose to solve problems for society. Or at least you want to make money. I don’t know what your motivation is for being an engineer. Maybe somebody just told you to go into engineering. Whatever the case, you’re going to be pushed to solve society’s problems. And the question is, are you going to make a difference?
We have to be the problem solvers for society. We need you to come out charged up about making a difference. It’s that time. It’s just you can’t play around anymore with it. You’ve just got to be interested in what you can do and what part you can play.
My charge on you is get ready. Don’t come to my organization and say, well, I didn’t know about climate change, I didn’t know how water works. I didn’t know that this infrastructure was that important. Do not do that. Prepare yourself to come to us ready to go.
Bring your lived experience to school every day and talk about the problems that you see every day. Stuff happens every day in the world. If you like helping people and making a difference, you chose the right degree.