A Day in the Life – Jeff Huber

For Jeff Huber, manager of operations support at Veolia ES Waste-to-Energy Miami-Dade, the work day begins when most of us still have 30 minutes left before the alarm starts buzzing. By 5:30 a.m., Jeff is onsite at Miami-Dade, beginning his daily tasks of working with the facility’s maintenance and operations teams, managing contract workers, and coordinating upcoming maintenance outages and other ongoing project work at the facility.

“Miami-Dade is a very large facility with many ‘moving parts’ that need to be managed dayto- day. When project work or outages take place at our location, everyone from the inhouse maintenance team, operations staff, and hourly and contracted employees is impacted,” said Jeff. “It’s my job to manage the projects, coordinating schedules, labor, budgets and materials,

to make sure the process goes smoothly. These can be very major tasks that take months to plan and execute, so it’s very rewarding to see a project through from start-to-finish, and to know that I’ve helped complete it on time and on budget.”

The two biggest projects of the year for Jeff are the spring and fall outages, scheduled to allow for maintenance and general facility upkeep. These outages can be the most difficult and complicated times for maintenance teams, and Jeff is key in managing the project. “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he said. “I used to find these projects very challenging, but I’ve learned the best way to approach them and handle any road bumps along the way.”

Jeff has a long history with the Miami-Dade facility, having started at the location 27 years ago in an entry-level position. Since then, he’s worked his way up through the company, holding a variety of positions in operations and maintenance, assuming his current position three years ago. “Since I started at Miami- Dade in 1982, the facility has gone through a night-and-day series of changes,” Jeff said. “Some of the most interesting changes for me have been seeing the facility go through its retrofit in 2000 to meet the Clean Air Act requirements and being involved in the OSHA VPP and ISO 140001 certification processes.”

When Jeff leaves Miami-Dade every day around 5:00 p.m., he heads home to spend evenings with his wife, Kim, and their three children – sons Bryant and Christopher, and daughter Alexandra. He also enjoys golfing and hitting the beach as much as possible in his free time. If you have any questions for Jeff about his position with Veolia ES Wasteto- Energy, feel free to contact him at jeff.huber@veoliaes.com or (305) 593-7166.