Marketing Specialist Dana Justice of SCS Engineers shares her favorite snack on Snacks with a Surprise while discussing Brownfields’ economic potential, the environmental impact, and the opportunity to serve communities through her support. Her work with SCS’s environmental consultants and engineers provides land remediation and Brownfields grants bringing properties with a past back to pristine condition. The redevelopment of these properties, typically with developed infrastructure already in place, provide jobs, housing, parks, and tax revenues for the surrounding community.
Learn more about the Urban Land Institutes’s Women’s Leadership Initiative or
more about Brownfield Remediation and Grants here.
SCS periodically prepares Technical Bulletins to highlight items of interest to our clients and friends who have signed up to receive them. We also publish these on our website at https://www.scsengineers.com/publications/technical-bulletins/.
Our most recent Bulletin entitled EPA Seeks Feedback On Inactive Surface Impoundments at Inactive Electric Utilities summarizes the EPA’s request for comments and information pertaining to inactive impoundments at inactive facilities.
Operators and owners who may be affected by forthcoming decisions around inactive CCR surface impoundments include electric utilities and independent power producers who generate CCR within the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 221112. Though the EPA states “other types of entities … could also be regulated” and advises those wanting to confirm if the regulation applies to them to read the applicability criteria and comment. Landowners with a legacy surface impoundment on their property purchased from a utility will want to review the proposed definitions closely.
SCS Engineers will continue to post timely information, resources, and presentations to keep you well informed. These include additional guidance, industry reaction, and webinars for our clients.
Visit our website for more information.
SCS Engineers announces Brittney Odom’s promotion to the Southeast region’s Environmental Services Director. Odom will continue expanding and integrating SCS’s environmental engineering and consulting operations to provide more streamlined and efficient services in her new role. She will lead environmental operations in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Caribbean. As with all SCS leaders, she continues serving her clients in Boca Raton in her expanded role.
Odom supports real estate developers, municipalities, banks, and insurance firms to identify properties’ environmental conditions. Next, depending on soil, water, and geotechnical testing determines the appropriate environmental due diligence and the engineering activities necessary to redevelop them and be in 100% compliance with local and federal rules.
There is an active push to develop more affordable residential housing in the U.S. Real estate developers and residents want to be close to business and transportation hubs, but potential development sites could require remediation. Once agricultural sites, golf courses, or at one-time housing industrial operations, these properties need environmental testing, due diligence, possibly remediation, or vapor intrusion barriers to ensure the safe redevelopment. No matter the condition, properties with a past can return to pristine condition and make desirable residential and mixed housing locations, supporting economic development.
“It’s important to know and understand all of the options ahead of time to keep costs down and environmental quality up for sustainable communities,” stated Odem. “You need to reassure all parties that there is no leaking storage tank or anything that could compromise health.”
Her focus recently is on the redevelopment of large-size properties contaminated with arsenic and other legally applied pesticides. These property types include golf courses and agricultural land that have become inactive but are in high demand for residential use. These projects may need soil management, including remediation, soil blending, and placement restrictions.
Odom has years of experience conducting environmental site assessments, overseeing remediation activities, and submitting regulatory reports, including Phase I & II assessments in Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, and the Caribbean. These focus on gas station properties and bulk storage terminals for large oil companies, often located on prime waterfront sites.
Additional highlights in Odom’s professional career include expertise in the applicable Florida Regulatory Chapters and Standard Operating Procedures. She also has experience in state and international cleanup efforts and their associated regulatory procedures. She participated in successful environmental closure efforts, with imposed engineering controls and property restrictions.
Odom has ten years of experience managing subsurface investigation and conducting oversight during remedial activities, including source removal and remediation system installation. She holds certifications in 40-Hour HAZWOPER/OSHA training, Loss Prevention System, CPR, RCRA Hazardous Waste, DOT Hazardous Waste, and American Petroleum Institute certification.
“Brittney’s breadth of experience solving the complexities of large scale redevelopment while meeting all environmental regulatory compliance enables her to innovative better solutions,” said Carlo Lebron, SCS vice president and director of SCS’s Southeast operations. “She’s an expert, with access to our deep bench of engineers, scientists, technology, and even economists within SCS.”
SCS Engineers now provides the Augusta Environmental Services Department with engineering, environmental and testing, and Construction Management & Quality Assurance Services at the Deans Bridge Road Landfill, in Blythe, Georgia. The facility operates under the State of Georgia Environmental Protection Division as a Subtitle D Landfill, accepting up to 1,500 tons per day of waste. Active and closed sections of the landfill comprise approximately 1,177 acres of property. Some additional acreage contains ancillary facilities such as office and maintenance buildings, customer drop off area, sediment ponds, roads, and leachate holding facilities. The Augusta Department of Environmental Services is responsible for the landfill facilities, solid waste management planning for Augusta, and all residential solid waste collections. Additionally, the Department is responsible for the Augusta Brownfield program and other environmental compliance issues.
Landfills are carefully engineered facilities closely regulated and monitored to ensure they have the protections necessary to prevent contamination of groundwater, air, and adjoining land. Best landfill management practices include collecting and treating leachate – the water that passes through a landfill. The methane gas naturally produced from decomposing landfill waste is collected and converted into various forms of energy – including compressed natural gas. This alternative fuel powers Augusta Solid Waste trucks or is a substitute for pipeline natural gas.
The Department consolidated all landfill services assigning them to SCS Engineers, a professional environmental consulting firm with over 50 years of experience in performing landfill site acceptability studies, landfill design services, landfill environmental compliance activities. The firm was already engaged in the Landfill’s Gas Collection and Control System (GCCS) expansion. The consolidation of services provides a more cost-effective approach for permitting, design, operations, monitoring, and maintenance. The comprehensive SCS team is a uniquely qualified and experienced full-service consulting and engineering team with demonstrated relevant field experience in Georgia. Leading the team is Sowmya Bulusu, a Georgia Professional Engineer, with over 12 years of landfill engineering performed in accordance with the Environmental Protection Division (EPD) of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the Georgia Solid waste management Act, and other applicable federal, state, and local rules and regulations. As the Project Director, Carlo Lebron is a registered Georgia Professional Engineer for 15 years bringing over 21 years of experience on over one hundred solid waste projects.
“The SCS team brought the five-year permit review submittal package in early, giving Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division plenty of time to deem it administratively complete,” stated Sowmya Bulusu. “Working with our field technicians, we quickly identified and brought at-risk gas wells into compliance, used our drones to provide an aerial survey of the entire landfill, saving Department funds.”
SCS Engineers’ environmental solutions directly result from our experience and dedication to solid waste management and other industries responsible for safeguarding the environment. Click for more information about comprehensive landfill services.
From SWANA’s Executive Summary
A new report developed by the SWANA Applied Research Foundation (ARF) addresses two important questions associated with municipal solid waste (MSW) at landfills.
What tasks will be required to manage closed landfills following the post-closure care period to ensure continued protection of public health and the environment?
How will those associated costs be paid for?
Subtitle D regulations require that the post-closure care period is maintained and the environmental protection systems are managed and monitored—it should be 30 years in length, but the period is determined by the state regulatory agency that issued the landfill permit. Once the post-closure period ends, the closed landfill enters into a new status, which SWANA defines as the “Long-Term Management,” or LTM period. EPA’s Subtitle D regulations don’t address monitoring and maintenance activities required during this period.
Based on the ARF’s research, the new report offers conclusions regarding the long-term management of MSW landfills during the LTM period. Some include best practices, but ARF also had some interesting conclusions related to final cover geomembranes and looking to landfills as longer-term assets.
The full report, The Long-Term Management of Closed MSW Landfills Following the Post-Closure Care Period, is currently available only to SWANA ARF subscribers. SWANA members receive free access to ARF industry reports one year after publication.
Contact your SCS Engineers Project Manager or local office for information on best practices.
FREE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR & Q/A – RECORDED JAN.21, 2021
Landfills, compost facilities, transfer stations, and renewable energy plants are cognizant of odor issues and strive to minimize odors. Proactive odor management is critical to the continued success and operation of these facilities.
More so than ever before, the solid waste industry faces complex and challenging odor issues based upon public, regulatory, and legal actions. Since odors are generally enforced through nuisance regulations, compliance can be difficult to achieve, not to mention almost impossible to define. Enforcement of odor nuisances is subjective, usually at the discretion of an environmental inspector or Air Pollution Control Officer, and often based upon citizen complaints. When citizen complaints mount, and enforcement action is leveraged, lawsuits often surface as an added ongoing challenge to waste facility operations. Now politicians are demanding action and using alleged odor violations as part of their environmental platforms. Facing odor issues can be costly and threaten the intended land-use designs that waste facilities require to serve their local communities.
SCS Engineers’ January webinar was for those who want to learn more about the proactive strategies and practices you can implement at your critical solid waste facilities. This free webinar will help you develop capabilities to assess the potential for odor issues and, by doing so, set realistic benchmarks toward cost-effective and meaningful mitigation measures.
Our panelists bring comprehensive expertise to the table, including facility design and planning, technical experience in air quality compliance and pollutant dispersion and air measurement programs, atmospheric dispersion and transport of airborne pollutants, particularly in the area of complex terrain. They will provide decades of strategies, resources, and best practices and technologies based on successful solutions that help support your facility as you prepare for, and likely will, experience odor complaints.
The team answers questions throughout the presentation, and the second portion of the program is devoted to Q&A and idea exchange.
In implementing the EPA’s federal requirements for Coal Ash Residual – CCR sites, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s CCR program needs to be at least as protective as the requirements of the self-implementing federal CCR rules. The TCEQ also is charged with making the Texas CCR program consistent with other TCEQ regulatory programs. As such, the TCEQ incorporated various provisions of state permitting programs and procedures into Chapter 352.
Whereas many of the EPA’s federal requirements are adopted directly by reference to the federal CCR rules (40 Code of Federal Regulations, as amended through April 17, 2015, issue of the Federal Register (80 FR 21301)), other requirements were tailored and, or expanded to be consistent with TCEQ programs. Following are select examples correlating the EPA and TCEQ requirements:
There were also five provisions of the federal CCR regulations that the TCEQ did not include in its permit program. These are addressed in EPA’S announcement regarding the TCEQ’s application requesting partial approval of their CCR state permit program. See https://www.epa.gov/coalash/us-state-texas-coal-combustion-residuals-ccr-permit-program
SCS Engineers and Florida East Coast Industries (FECI) are to be honored at the annual conference in Florida planned for August 2021. The firms will receive a 2021 Engineering Excellence Award by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Florida. The honor acknowledges SCS for the environmental engineering firm’s innovative design that integrates groundwater remediation with the stormwater management system on a 500-acre former landfill site. The design enabled the developer to remediate the former landfill into the Countyline Corporate Park in Southeast Florida.
Industrial real estate is in high demand, but former landfills and brownfields present environmental challenges that can become cost-prohibitive to redevelop without sound environmental expertise. FECI retained the professional services of SCS Engineers to provide consulting and design services addressing the environmental concerns preventing the transformation of a former landfill into a state of the art business park.
Environmental guidelines require 28% (or about 140 acres) of the site to be set aside for stormwater retention. The set aside would require the relocation of several thousand cubic yards of waste and prevent the 140 acres’ redevelopment. The estimated loss of $300 million in potential real estate sales, coupled with the groundwater remediation expense, made the site redevelopment cost-prohibitive. Unless resolved, the problem also impeded FECI’s corporate sustainability goals.
SCS’s experts in landfill design, closure, and remediation, developed a solution tying together the groundwater remediation and stormwater management systems. The integrated system allows for shallow aquifer recharge with stormwater and captures impacted groundwater at the site’s boundary. “We were able to provide an alternative design acceptable to all the permitting agencies, eliminating the need to set aside large areas for stormwater retention,” said Mr. Som Kundral, P.E., SCS’s senior project manager.
SCS’s remedial actions protect public health while opening the site for reuse. The project will be completed in phases. Phase I, consisting of 160 acres, is complete, with two million square feet of occupied businesses and a 30-acre community park. Development of the other three phases, which include another six million square feet, is underway.
The development will create hundreds of new jobs, deliver several hundred million dollars to the city and county tax base, and provide a 30-acre public park. “The engineering solution protects the environment while meeting FECI’s strategic, social, economic, and sustainability goals,” said Mr. Eduardo Smith, P.E., SCS’s senior vice president of client success.
Learn more about these related topics, events, and case studies at SCS Engineers:
EPA is hosting a free workshop in January on landfill monitoring and emissions. The workshops are scheduled twice, over half-day sessions. These sessions will include presentations highlighting the latest technological developments for monitoring and measuring landfill gas emissions.
Dates and Times: Register once for both sessions.
If you have any questions, please contact Shannon Banner at or John Evans at .
Maura Dougherty is joining SCS’s Southwest Business Unit as a Senior Project Manager in the solid waste engineering practice. Dougherty will execute engineering design, operations support, and construction quality assurance projects. She is responsible for project management, client service, business development, technical leadership, and overseeing professional staff teams. Dougherty reports to Vice President and Southwest Business Unit Director of Engineering, Vidhya Viswanathan, P.E., from SCS’s Pleasanton office.
“Maura is a senior professional with proven extensive success in solid waste engineering, construction, and construction quality assurance solutions,” said Viswanathan. “Her experience managing landfill and landfill gas collection and control system engineering and construction projects strengthen our efforts to support our solid waste and recycling clients.”
Dougherty is a registered Professional Engineer in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. She brings over 20 years of experience overseeing landfill engineering and construction projects, coordinating with regulatory staff, conducting design and technical reviews, and supporting construction work. Dougherty earned her B.S.E. in civil engineering at the University of Princeton and her M.S. in environmental engineering from U.C. Berkeley.
Corporate Headquarters
3900 Kilroy Airport Way Suite 300
Long Beach, CA 90806
Telephone
1 (800) 767-4727
1 (562) 427-0805 | FAX
Contact Us
