This week’s speaker was Stephan Parker. He talked mainly about career opportunities, jobs as an environmental engineer, and his experiences in New Port, Rhode Island. According to his profile, he is a senior project manager at Tetra Tech and he has over 20 years of experiences with environmental contract, research, and consulting capacities. He is also a group supervisor and manages the environmental restoration program for the Naval Station-Newport.
He started his presentation by talking about career opportunities in the field of environmental engineering. He told us that you can either study about groundwater treatment, restoration, construction management, international aids, mine and minerals or work as a site investigator. Adding to this information, he also gave us tips on how we can get jobs easier. He stated that we should be flexible, have core strength, determine your weaknesses and fix them, keep training until you are good at it, get certification and finally identify yourself. Out of these tips, he wants us to be flexible with our decisions. He told us that even if something wrong happens, we should always control our emotions and move on. From his experiences, he strongly emphasized those new employees these days are very short tempered and quit their job too easily. Secondly, he wants us to find our weaknesses and fix them before they enter the field of environmental engineering. About a month ago from this presentation, he encountered some new employees stressing out over what they have done and how poorly they were handling with themselves. Mr. Parker wants us to understand each of our weaknesses and fix them first because after you are employed, you are expected to do what the company or your boss tells you and not a place to fix them. I was very intrigued by his tips because it made a lot of sense and it is something that no one would tell us.
After his talk about career opportunities, he went off to talk about different jobs as an environmental engineer. He explained that jobs for environmental engineers depend on the situations around the world and what you’re good at. For example, environmental engineering in sewage and water contaminations was big when Hurricane Katrina hit Florida because people down there were having difficulties with rebuilding the water system again. As another example, when BP (Gas Company) had an oil spill about 1-2 years ago, a lot of environmental engineers were down at Florida to help with how to reconstruct a better operating driller and how to handle with the destruction of ecosystem. As we can see from his examples, environmental engineering is very swaying depend on what happens.
Then, he gave us some explanations about the US navy installation restoration program. I found this very interesting because the government had created all of these oil tanks and water tower for their own benefits but ended up not using them and contaminated the area around it. As for the water towers, because the paint consisted of lead, the sediments and the water around the water towers are contaminated by lead. As for the oil tanks, these 2 million gallon fuel tanks are leaking and contaminated the sediments as well as underground water sources.
It was extremely interesting that he talked to us from career opportunities to his experiences as an environmental engineer. I feel like Mr. Parker was the most interesting speaker so far after Ms. Erin Margolius because she didn’t give us as much tips on jobs even though she talked about jobs. I wish I can see Mr. Parker again and listen to his presentation again.

Today,
we had Erin Margolius as our guest speaker. She is a registered civil engineer
in Massachusetts and a project manager for CDM Smith. When I saw that she was
also from CDM Smith like Dr.Vicens, I thought she would be talking about the
career opportunities, however her topic was somewhat different from all of the
speakers we had so far. I felt like her speech was a lot more interesting than
for the past two weeks because the speakers were more leaned towards about the
experiences and opportunities rather than how environmental engineers are
important. Ms.Margolius began her speech with the difference between the traditional
project delivery and the alternative project delivery then talked to us how in
both systems, environmental engineers are needed.

Both traditional and alternative project delivery have some advantages as well as disadvantages.
In traditional project delivery, the owner is at the top of the cycle. The
owner would distribute his ideas and his desires to the designer and the
designer would create a model from what the owner has requested. Then that
model would be sent to the construction manager, analyzed through different
constructors and after the model is approved as safe and worth the cost, it
would get constructed.

As we can see, this process takes extremely long time because it has to go
through a lot of acceptance and people but in addition, as time goes on the
cost increases as well because you have to have these employees employed.
Furthermore, the expense and the risk of traditional project delivery is high
because firstly, the owner must find the lowest bidder since it costs a lot of
money but lower the bid, there would be more conflicts with the money and
employees. Except the advantage of the traditional project delivery is that
owner has the authority to control everyone.

On the other hand, the alternative project delivery is very different. The
owner is still the head of the process but he has less responsibility since
he/she only has to deal with the designer and construction manager. In
traditional, the owner would have to control designer, construction manager and
the G.C. Also, alternative is a lot faster and because it is faster, it costs
less money than traditional. For example, a project called Auburn-Lewiston ME
Water Treatment Facility; it only took 27 months because it was done through
alternative project delivery. It is estimated that if it was to be done by
traditional, it would take about 33 months. That is half a year worth of time
saved.
From this, it is clear that the alternative project delivery is way more efficient
as well as better for everyone since shorter the time means more jobs to be
done.

When I heard about these
projects and how engineers are the key components to these success in building
facilities and designing have made me feel like if I can someone learn more
about these technics, it can be very useful in the future when I go to japan to
help Japan with their reconstruction. As of right now, I am hoping that I can
someone move towards this pathway. I really enjoyed this speech.

The term “environmental” and “safe” have been the new idea these days. Many of the developed countries are trying to be more caring about our world by reducing emissions, and developing new technologies. One of the ideas is hydraulic fracturing. Though this technology was first introduced in the 1907, it has become extremely popular since the 1950s.

Background:
               Hydraulic fracturing is a technology used to mine out natural gases from rocks by using pressurized fluid to create fractures so they can extract them out. The fluid usually consists of water, chemicals and sands. Water and the chemical allows them to drill down and the sand keeps the fissures (where natural gas is trapped) open so the natural gas would flow into the drilled tube more efficiently. (Gas enters the tube and to the surface because it is less dense than the rock)

Process:
1. First they would need to find a location that has natural gas.

2. After the natural gas is located, they need to collect tons and tons of water, sands and chemicals.

3. Then, they would drill 10 feet into the rock before they can start their process because if they were to drill from 0ft, it would create an inaccurate hole and cause problems.

4. After everything is set to place, they would insert a tube into the 10 feet hole that is attached to the truck and start their process.

5. The fracturing usually occurs until 900 feet into the rock layer because most of the natural gases are located around 900-1100 feet deep down.

Results:
               From recent tests and experiments, hydraulic fracturing has been extremely successful in a way that it’s a very easy process and can be done with relatively low costs. Due to these factors, many of the countries worldwide are using this method.

(Cont.):
Positive:
-Very efficient and there are no air pollution occurring from this process
– Easy and a lot more cheaper than creating a nuclear power plant or  any other environmental tools.

Negative:
-Usage of hydraulic fracturing is very contaminating. The chemical used in hydraulic fracturing is very toxic. Some of the chemicals include arsenic, mercury, lead, boron, benzene, xylene and etc. From this, it shows that it is very high risked processs.
-There are some cases that after they finished extracting the gases, the fluid would rise back up and contaminate the area. Some of the states that were affected are Alabama, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

REFERENCE:
http://www.propublica.org/special/hydraulic-fracturing-national

http://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/hydraulic_fracturing

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/amall/incidents_where_hydraulic_frac.html

http://fracdallas.org/docs/fracturing.html

Our guest speaker today was Mark Johnson. He is the Deputy Director of the Upper Blackstone Water Pollution
Abatement District and came to our class today to talk about his experiences in
Haiti after the earthquake. He explained to us that although he has been
working as a civil engineer for over 28 years, he had never seen such
disastrous site as Haiti. The earthquake that struck Tohoku Japan in March of 2011
had a catastrophic magnitude of 8.9M and only killed about 22,000 people,
however the earthquake in Haiti was 7M, yet about 320,000 Haitians were killed.
He explained to us that the reason behind this massive damage of Port Au Prince/Haiti
was due to the poor structure of the houses along the hillside.  They were mostly made out of woods, plastics,
and other materials that are very unstable against strong shaking or any
unusual movements. As a result of these poorly designed structures and
materials, many Haitians were crushed from falling ceilings and complete
destruction of the building.

Right after the earthquake, people from all over the world tried to help Haiti by sending in food and
shelters but due to the destruction of roads, bridges, and ports, the whole
country was in a chaos. They were expecting the clean-up to take about six
months but even after two years, Haiti is having difficulty reconstructing back
their country. Their government hasn’t been established yet as most of the
residents do not have their own houses; most of them live in a house made out
of a sheet of plastic cover with five plus people. Although it’s a fact that
Haiti isn’t going well with their reconstruction but according to Mark Johnson,
he specifically stated that what Haiti really needs right now is the water
system. Recreating the government and stabilizing the country are important
but, as a survival, he strongly stated that water is what they need.

He was one of the members that strongly pushed the water system to be fixed and he was successful. 90% of
the pipes in the town were destroyed and there were no ways for them to bring
the water to everyone. So as a project, Mark Johnson and his group planned and
created a water refining system that used rain water as a water source. In most
cases, rain water were considered as acid rain and weren’t used as a way to get
drinking water. However, when they checked the drinking water, it was polluted
up to 20-30CF/100mL. This is not a level that we consider drinking water, but
because the Haitians’ lives was extremely harsh that they were so used to it.  When developed country people were to drink
this water, they would get extremely sick.

When someone from a well-developed country read about their lives, it is extremely shocking and would
feel some sympathy for them, but the people there are glad to have helps from
other countries and have a home.

Opinion:
Throughout the whole speech, I couldn’t stop listening to what he was saying. As he talked
about his experience in Haiti, it reminded me of the time when I went
volunteering to Japan. For the past two years, I have been volunteering in
Japan to help with the reconstruction because as a Japanese and living in such
beautiful and free country, I felt an urge to do help my own country. It stuck
me especially when at the end he said “The people there were glad to have the
world help them”. I felt emotional and I just couldn’t forget what he said
after his speech. From listening to what he said, it had motivated me to study
Environmental Engineering even more because I decided to major in EE because I
wanted to help my people with their water, air, and other environmental problems.

I am very glad to meet and hear Mark Johnson’s speech.