Persistent as water: Celebrating the women engineers of King County WTD

International Women in Engineering Day, observed every June 23, traces its roots to 1919, when a group of women who had stepped into engineering roles during the First World War refused to step back out when it ended. They formed the Women’s Engineering Society to fight for their place in the profession and to hold the door open for others. It took nearly a century for the world to formally mark what they started: the day was founded in 2014, received UNESCO patronage in 2017, and has grown into a global celebration ever since. The tenacity of those founding women is not a historical footnote. It is a living thread. More than a hundred years later, women still hold just 15.4 percent of engineering occupations in the United States. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024; Society of Women Engineers, swe.org/research/2026/us-employment.)

King County Wastewater Treatment Division is filled with women engineers, at every level, across every discipline, doing extraordinary work every day. The seven women featured here are a handful of them. They agreed to share their stories: of how they got here, what they have built, and what they want the next generation to know. These are not tidy success narratives. They are real ones, full of detours, persistence, encouragement from unexpected places, and the deep satisfaction of work that matters.

The Stories

Lauren Burch, Wastewater Engineer, grew up watching her father build airplanes in the family garage. Not kits or models: full aircraft, every part fabricated by hand. He competed in aerobatic competitions, survived engine failures by staying calm, and became a flight instructor just to teach Lauren and her brother to fly. His philosophy, absorbed over years in that garage: take-offs are optional – landings are mandatory. Keep flying the airplane. When college professors told her she was not cut out for engineering and should consider dropping out, she kept “flying” until she landed an engineering degree. She switched to geology, earned a master’s in civil engineering, and found her way to public works. “I fell in love with the concept of public works,” she says. “Public infrastructure and waste management are the foundation of modern human civilization.” She carries her father’s lesson with her still.

“Do what you love, what interests you, what keeps you awake at night thinking about, even if it’s really, really hard. Deep breaths. Keep flying the airplane.”  — Lauren Burch, Wastewater Engineer

Crystal Fleet, Project Resources Unit Manager, helped to build something that will shape King County’s infrastructure for years to come. The portfolio management framework she worked on developed WTD’s 10-year, $14 billion capital program: a structured system for prioritizing, sequencing, and making investment decisions across hundreds of projects simultaneously. She did this by drawing on a chemical engineering foundation and a career that moved from oil and gas process engineering to public service when her values and the industry she was in stopped aligning. Behind her was the example of her mother, who studied computer science in the late 1960s as a Black woman in a field that was almost entirely white and male. “Seeing her succeed in that environment showed me that even if I was the only one who looked like me in a room, that didn’t mean I didn’t belong there.”

“If you’re even a little bit interested, go for it. Even if you never become a practicing engineer, the way you approach problems will stay with you.”  — Crystal Fleet, Project Resources Unit Manager

Mary Beth Gilbrough, Unit Manager of the Project Engineering and Technical Resources Unit, has been at WTD for 24 years. When her sons were young and she worked part time, she was still project engineer on some of the division’s most demanding in-house designs, including the 53rd Street Pump Station Upgrade, the Barton Pump Station Upgrade, and the Rainier Wet Weather Storage project. WTD’s flexibility during that period of her life made it possible for her to keep growing, and she has not forgotten it. She went on to manage major capital projects, including the Coal Creek Sewer Upgrade, and now leads the ETR unit she started in decades ago. Her door is open to any woman considering a career in engineering. “I will always take a call,” she says. “There are so many paths this career can take you.”

Liz Matson, Offsite PMOA Lead, spent 15 years in engineering consulting before joining WTD, where she has spent 11 more. Her proudest achievement is the Jameson project, which started and stalled three times before she saw it through to completion. That kind of persistence, the willingness to pick a hard thing back up, is characteristic. Working for a public agency also brought something she had not expected: a front-row seat to how infrastructure touches communities and requires not just technical skill but civic patience, ratepayer trust, and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it. She brings all of that to her current role, shaping how major capital projects are managed and accountable across the division.

 

Samayyah Williams, PE, PMP, Process Control Supervisor at Brightwater Treatment Plant, took the scenic route. She tried astronomy, spent time in consulting, moved through asset management work she had not trained for but credits as essential, and eventually landed at Brightwater as a process engineer. Now she supervises a team and spends her mornings scanning real-time plant data for anything that looks “odd”- a mixer running too slowly, pressure drops where there shouldn’t be, a number that does not fit; then works with operations and maintenance to figure out why. She is also one of WTD’s most visible community ambassadors, speaking with youth groups, giving plant tours, and sharing an animated PowerPoint she built herself explaining how wastewater treatment works. “I feel really proud when people show genuine interest in how we collaborate to keep the system running.”

“Lean on those of us who have been in this industry for a while. You’re definitely not alone and you never will be.”  — Samayyah Williams, PE, PMP, Process Control Supervisor, Brightwater

Rebecca Gauff, PE, PMP, Project Manager and Mechanical Engineer, was steered toward engineering by teachers and counselors who saw something in her. She has spent her career repaying that investment by showing up fully, staying curious, and passing the favor along. Her philosophy on mentorship is characteristically direct: “There are always others, and I still get inspired every day by colleagues, consultants, strangers. In the end, no one can do your pushups for you. And when you’re in the right spot, you will, by default or purposely, return the inspiration favor in your unique way to others.”

“Know that you are capable and that you belong, even if there are bumps along the way. The skills are within; they may just need to be coaxed out in the right way.”  — Rebecca Gauff, PE, PMP, Project Manager and Mechanical Engineer

 

Karla Guevarra, Wastewater Process Engineer III, grew up in Vallejo, California, with a love of math and science and no clear path forward, until a high school math teacher asked a simple question: had she ever considered engineering? She had not. That question sent her to community college, then to UC Berkeley, then to a career she loves. Years later she tracked down that teacher to say thank you. The work she is most proud of is a day her team modified aeration basins in-house, without a large capital project, to add phosphorus removal to an existing treatment process. The solution was straightforward. The collaboration across teams to solve problems was the achievement.

“Do what you enjoy and it won’t feel like work.”  — Karla Guevarra, Wastewater Process Engineer III

What They Have in Common

These seven women work in different roles, at different stages of their careers, on different problems. What they share is harder to quantify: a commitment to public service, a willingness to do hard things, and a generosity toward the women coming up behind them. Every one of them, when asked what advice they would give a young woman considering this field, answered without hesitation.

They are not representative of all the remarkable women at WTD. They are seven of them. On International Women in Engineering Day, we celebrate them, and all the others, for the careers they have built and the work they do every day on behalf of the people and communities King County serves.