Blog & Recent Projects

Climate Change and Sea Level Change.

Two controversial topics for some, but well-documented science.  I had an opportunity to read "The Water Will Come" by Jeff Goodell, one of Booklist's Top 10 Science Books of 2017, on an extended plane trip during this holiday season.  Goodell presents a well-researched overview of the impact of climate change and the associated changes in sea level on countries, populations, infrastructure, and politics.   While the geopolitical challenges of climate change are well beyond the scope of most of our local environmental remediation efforts, Goodell did prompt me to reflect on a few observations we've made in the field and the potential impacts to come.

Is your remediation site in a low lying or coastal area?   US EPA confirmed Hurricane Harvey impacted 13 of 41 of the US’s most-toxic waste sites in the Houston area in 2017.  Goodell points out that the "Runit Dome, a concrete bunker on Enewetak Atoll where the US military buried 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive debris left behind after then nuclear tests of the Cold War. It sits right at sea level.  "It is already cracked, and as the waters rise, it will be submerged, creating  a problem of nuclear waste in adjoining waters."

Is the infrastructure that supports your remediation systems or access to your facilities at risk in high-water conditions?     The reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan resulted from the failure of the cooling water systems in turn caused by the loss of power sources in extremely high water conditions precipitated by the tsunami and storm surge.  Critical infrastructure and no doubt remediation systems failed in New York and New Jersey as a result of Super Storm Sandy.

The Navy base at Norfolk, VA, the largest in the U.S., anticipates a significant impact to operations (and environmental cleanup) by 2020. 

How have changes in groundwater levels affected your long-term remediation systems?  Even the performance of remedial systems sited a distance from low lying areas are often highly dependent on the accurate placement of system hardware in relationship to groundwater levels.  Most readily affected are systems that rely on groundwater control through pumping or multiple phase extraction.  Changing storm patterns result in often significant changes in groundwater level potentially with costly impact on the effectiveness of installed remediation systems. 

So, you’ve decided that a high-resolution 3D assessment of your site would help clear up the uncertainty in where any residual product is hiding and what its spatial relationship is to the soil permeability and the installed monitoring and recovery wells.  How do you get started?

Multiple organizations including U.S. EPA (www.epa.gov/ust), ASTM International (astm.org), the Interstate Training and Regulatory Council (ITRC.org), the American Petroleum Institute (API.org), the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRCCare.com), and the individual state jurisdictions all have published guidelines for undertaking a systematic assessment of petroleum contaminated sites. 

Turns out, you probably have a lot of important information readily available to get started.  Your key to success going forward will be both a systematic review of where your current LCSM stands to identify data gaps and uncertainties followed by a systematic data collection effort to close those data gaps with multiple lines of evidence.

The EPA's Office of Underground Storage Tanks (OUST) reports the number of cases of Leaking Underground Storage Tanks remaining unresolved exceeds 70,000 across the U.S. The EPA data also indicates the average cost of cleanup as US$130,000.  As with any data, it's important to look at the distribution of data, not just averages.  A vivid (maybe too vivid) example of this “flaw of statistics” is the fact that the average age of diaper wearer is somewhere near middle age, let’s say 45 years old.  Drilling down into the data available from individual state UST cleanup funds, we find many examples of cleanup costs exceeding US$1.0M, sometimes with no end in sight.  We can reasonably infer from the OUST data that the less complex sites have been resolved at a lower cost of cleanup, leaving the more complex sites yet to be addressed.  This begs the question – WHY?

COLUMBIA Technologies do Brasil, Ltda. Continues to Build Relationships in Latin America at the V International Congress on Subsurface Environment (CIMAS 2017) 

SÃO PAULO, BRASIL – October 30, 2017 – COLUMBIA Technologies do Brasil, Ltda,  a leading environmental assessment and analysis firm in Brasil will be in attendance at the V Congresso Internacional de Meio Ambiente Subterrâneo in São Paulo, Brasil.  COLUMBIA Technologies do Brasil provides high-resolution site characterization assessments to aid property owners in reducing the risk, uncertainty and cost of contaminated land investigation and remediation. COLUMBIA will attend with their joint venture partner, Aragon Perfurações e Sondagens, a services firm offering the largest array of advanced environmental drilling equipment in Brasil.

COLUMBIA’s CEO, John Sohl, and the Aragon staff will be available to answer questions regarding advanced site characterization technologies and strategies, the latest rock coring direct push equipment, and SmartData Solutions®. 

 Mature groundwater plumes for environmental contaminants pose a complex challenge with regards to accurate delineation of sources, vertical and lateral extent, dominant pathways, and likely storage zones for residual contaminants.  It is not uncommon for plumes from multiple sources to commingle and diffuse across a relatively large distance and a varied hydrogeological spatial volume. As a result, uncertainty in the accuracy of the conceptual site model (CSM) increases, and in turn the associated risk assessment, and the costs contemplated for cleanup alternatives.  Better data resolution and scale are required to reduce these uncertainties.  Low-Level Membrane Interface Probe Technology with Hydraulic Profiling (HPT) provides one approach for obtaining cost-effective and reliable high-resolution data, at a more informative scale in order to improves CSMs and enable better decision-making.

International Seminar Relasc-Nicole Management of Sites Contaminated by Hydrocarbons

COLUMBIA Technologies, LLC, a veteran-owned small business provider of high-resolution site characterization services, and our Brazilan subsidiary, COLUMBIA Technologies do Brasil, Ltda. are pleased to support the  International Seminar Relasc-Nicole Management of Sites Contaminated by Hydrocarbons. COLUMBIA's co-founder, Mr. John Sohl, will provide recent lessons learned in LNAPL Mobility, Recoverability, and How to Use High-Resolution.   In addition, John will support a Workshop on Conceptual Site Model Development on Friday, 02 June.   The seminar and workshop will take place in Lima, Peru 31 May through 02 June.  

COLLABORATIVE TEAM EFFORT HELPS MONETIZE THE COST OF LNAPL CLEANUP FOR TDEC

COLUMBIA Technologies was selected by PM Environmental to support a high-resolution assessment of a former retail gas station with persistent LNAPL contamination.  The goal of the assessment was to evaluate for the Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation the impact of better information on monetizing the cost of long-term correctives action at these types of sites.  The site is one of 246 remaining "difficult to resolve" sites in Tennessee and is typical of the many of over 16,000 remaining Leaking Underground Storage Tank sites in the U.S.  The project involved a careful review of historical documents, cleanup activities, and extended field activities after hours and at night.   

Detailed information gained through this effort delineated an extensive amount of residual gasoline within difficult soil conditions highlighting the need for careful consideration of remedial alternatives.  The team employed the guidelines of the ITRC Technical and Regulatory Guidance for Evaluating LNAPL Remedial Technologies for Achieving Project Goals.  

 It is safe to say that 99% of all site assessments are either conducted through traditional sampling, groundwater monitoring wells, or direct sensing methods. As a leading site investigation partner to environmental consultants throughout North America and Hawaii, COLUMBIA Technologies specializes in soil and groundwater contamination assessments.

Since 1999, we have completed over 750 site assessments for some of the most discriminating clients including oil companies, government agencies, commercial real estate owners, developers, as well as architectural and engineering firms. Throughout all of our testing and experiences to date, we believe that using a comprehensive High Resolution Vertical Profiling approach seems to be the most cost-effective and accurate method to assess a contaminated site. This consists of direct sensing technologies to delineate the vertical and horizontal extent of the contamination to pinpoint the location. Once this information is known, following up with confirmation soil and groundwater samples would take place to validate the contaminant of concern.

The direct sensing technologies may cost more up front, however they assure that accurate information is being collected to move forward with designing remediation plans. In addition, our patented real-time data services platform, SmartData Solutions®, is able to produce high resolution visualizations through a secured website for online review of project data.

With 30-years of experience in strategic planning, technical management, and laboratory supervision with the U.S. Navy,  Gayle Goff, joins the COLUMBIA Technologies team in the role of Quality Assurance Manager. As our Quality Assurance Manager, Gayle is responsible for conducting self-assessments, analyzing quality performance metrics, and the execution of improvements of quality programs. During her time overseeing Safety and Occupational Health programs for hospitals, clinics, research laboratories and educational facilities worldwide, Gayle led key initiatives to streamline self-assessments, set performance metrics, and improve quality of programs in a well-focused, consistent, systematic and quantifiable manner.

 John Sohl, COLUMBIA Technologies' CEO, attended the 8th Symposium on the Design and Construction of Hazardous Waste Sites hosted by the Philadelphia Post of the Society of Military Engineers (www.samephildelphiapost.org). The focus of the symposium was how to incorporate performance based contracting into the environmental restoration of complex sites covered by the nation's Superfund Program.

John's key take-a-ways from the symposium were:

• The remaining Superfund sites are extremely complex. Successful restoration will be driven by detailed characterization built upon multiple lines of evidence and the best available science and technologies.
• Successful participants in future cleanups will be characterized by highly collaborative teams with aligned goals, risk, and reward.
• Information will drive clarity and successful communication with all stakeholders involved in the restoration efforts. Even after restoration efforts begin, there will be a continuing need for adaptive management using data-driven performance metrics.

The PBC contracts will be procured across multiple EPA regions in three major groups: Design Environmental Services (DES), Remediation Environmental Services (RES), and Environmental Services and Operations (ESO). Procurements will be open to both large and small businesses. The new contracting acquisition framework is being handled through EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation Technology and Innovation (OSRTI) (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/partners/osrti/) and FedBizOpps (www.fbo.gov).