by John Hankins, LEP, Technical Director
I’m occasionally asked to write project profiles by our Marketing Department. The projects selected for these profiles demonstrate our expertise in any number of disciplines. They fail, however, to fully capture the rich diversity of the professional experience at Fuss & O’Neill – I’m talking here about the interesting project tidbits that you hear around the water cooler that might not be fit for widespread consumption. Here are a few from the Environmental Team’s top ten list:
1. The Bizarre: I answered a phone call from a frantic woman who needed me to get to her house right away for what she perceived as catastrophic environmental event. “The ants are running around in circles in the basement and I think there’s an environmental cause!” After determining that the unusual ant behavior was the ONLY symptom of a potential environmental terror lurking in her basement, I politely declined this lucrative business opportunity and suggested she call an exterminator.
2. The Lurid: For several years we worked for a self-described first-amendment attorney who defended adult-themed businesses from frivolous lawsuits. The project brought us to many interesting locales, including the dressing room of a… ahem…lets go with “gentleman’s club”… where we conducted a soil gas survey and made several new friends. We performed a Phase I Environmental Assessment and a… ahem…let’s call it a “bookstore” (though there weren’t a lot of books). For this assignment, our recently hired intrepid investigator insisted on seeing the basement of the building, where the business maintained several…well…geez… “private viewing spaces”.
3. The Macabre: Over the two decades that we operated ground-penetrating radar, we got several opportunities to look for human remains. These included a project for the State Police, who believed a man had buried his wife under the concrete slab of their garage (he hadn’t) and a request to do a subsurface survey of a proposed underground utility line after a human skull had fallen into a preliminary part of the excavation.
4. The Just Plain Disgusting: A former employee will not soon forget the kosher slaughterhouse we sent him to inspect, which featured a “head room” that needs no further explanation.
John Hankins, LEP
About the Author:
John has been a Licensed Environmental Professional in Connecticut since 1998, and he has personally issued final verifications at over a dozen sites under Connecticut’s Property Transfer Law program, among the most of any Licensed Environmental Professional in the State. His principal strength is working with clients and regulators to develop creative environmental solutions at complex sites within the context of the plan of development and the applicable regulations.
