The environment and the health of our ecosystem is very important to me, and I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't feel I was helping the situation. As someone who really cares about the environment, I wanna make sure we're doing the type of studies and work that are are gonna be a benefit. I'm John Torrick, and I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at a time.
Today, we'll meet a team of environmental scientists and biologists whose job entails everything from managing their own boat fleet to using high powered within their own lab, to the custom fabrication of the specialized equipment needed for the water quality and biological monitoring jobs. Together, they offer some of the most interesting perspectives of aquatic life surrounding New York City and the Tri State area. Most of my friends were on the pre med track, but I quickly learned that, you
know, I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be, you know, on boats doing field studies and really, you know, gain that passion during my college years. That's Dave Davis, who today is more than thirty years into a career as an environmental scientist.
Right out of school, I started with HDR Engineering, one of their predecessor companies, and instantly fell in love with being on the water, especially in New York Harbor, and had some really interesting surveys, water quality collections, trips around Manhattan. The view and the excitement just couldn't be
beat and really was hooked for life. Dave returned to school for a master's degree in science and environmental journalism, spending several years as a freelance journalist before returning to HDR. That ability to communicate scientific information made Dave a natural fit for writing reports
for clients conducting environmental studies. He also manages a group crossing several specialized disciplines throughout New York and New Jersey, including a cutting edge team that performs environmental field work and laboratory services out of Nanuet, New York. I think in the simplest terms, what these scientists are doing is they're collecting environmental data. They're doing environmental studies, water quality collections, a whole variety of different type of, soil sampling, remediation.
It sort of covers the whole environmental field. The Nanuet team is officially known as the Environmental Measurements and Data Acquisition Center. We've typically marketed ourselves as, like, a one stop shop here, a full service field operation center capable of taking a project start to finish. That's Aaron Deppert, the facility lead of the center and a field equipment and fabrication specialist.
I manage a 12,000 square foot facility, which includes a 7,000 square foot equipment storage warehouse. Also included in that is a fab full fabrication shop. We have 13 full time environmental scientists slash biologists here and higher up to 10 to 12 temporary staff annually for, seasonal work. In a roundabout way, it was seasonal work that led to
Aaron's unique career choice. You know, what got me interested in this field, I don't know if it's conventional or not, but I grew up in a family that enjoyed the outdoors, spent a lot of time hiking, camping, fishing, all the typical stuff. My father owned a landscape design company, so I got involved with that at a very early age. You you would think that maybe that led to the environmental field from a work standpoint, but for me, you know, my father always reminded me of
this. I I didn't wanna landscape for the rest of my life. So my natural choice was environmental sciences, environmental studies. But in college, I sort of found a passion for it. Aaron's team of environmental scientists and biologists operates like a small business within a much larger firm, nimble enough to customize their specialized services
based on the job. We can custom design, build, and execute field monitoring and sampling programs to address our clients' permitting and compliance monitoring needs, as well as provide the scientists and equipment to complete the project, which I think separates us from a lot of other groups where they're subbing out a lot of the the field work and or having to rent equipment and procure a boat and a captain.
Aaron manages a fleet of more than 10 custom boats ranging from a canoe to a 28 foot Parker Research vessel equipped with sonar to map the depths of the ocean. And if you're talking about boats, well, Aaron is definitely your guy. Here in Nanuet, we have two larger research vessels. One is a 28 foot Parker with twin 250 horsepower outboards. This boat has a custom davit with an electric capstan winch, full GPS navigation system.
Basically, just an all around high speed research vessel capable of doing fisheries work, water quality, and it's a fast boat, so we can cover ground, mobilize down to the Lower Bay or Jamaica Bay at the New York Harbor. The other research vessel is a 25 foot Parker. Very similar boat. This boat has the same davit and winch system as well as an a frame
off back for a tow and bottom. The fleet also includes two eighteen foot Maycraft center consoles, a 19 foot Carolina skiff, two eighteen foot aluminum john boats, and a smaller 12 foot aluminum john boat. Not to mention an inflatable Achilles raft, two canoes, and a handful of custom boats permanently deployed on jobs. But before members of Erin's team ever get out to the water or in the field, they start each job in the lab. I love the diversity
of work that we do. I like having a little field work, a little lab work, some writing, some management. It never gets boring. That's Kate Esler, who supervises the team's 5,000 square foot tax onomy laboratory. We identify larval fish and invertebrates and also do some water quality analysis. We're using microscopes. We have a digital camera that's connected to one of them so we can digitally measure these fish and come up with measurements that we can then see what
technologies could maybe screen these organisms out. But I'd say the technology is not what makes our lab great. It's the staff. It's the taxonomist. Kate emanates the type of enthusiasm for her work that drives someone to become an expert in their field. Invertebrates, in particular, fish also, some of those little vital creatures are so unique and cool. And, you know, in our work, we're always finding new ones with every new, you know, habitat we're working in or every new area
we're working in. It's always, exciting to see what what we can find. Not surprisingly, Kate's doing what she always wanted to do. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time during summers as a kid, you know, wandering through tide pools in New England and some lakes in Adirondacks. So that always inspired me, and I've been taking science classes from middle school through grad school. And I kinda feel lucky to have always known that my passion lies with science and
aquatic science. Kate and her team in the lab facility help plan each study as she and Dave explained. We're definitely involved in the planning and the writing of the work plan to make sure what they're collecting is exactly what we need in the lab. This is very detailed and intricate work. Most of our folks here are cross trained, so our taxonomist has done all
all of the things in the field. And the other way around too, a lot of the field folks have spent some time in the lab, so they know what we need to be careful about in the field. And a lot of our project managers too, some of them have started here, so they know what it's like in the field and in the lab. I think that's really well said,
Kate. And I think, like, one of the unique things that Kate and others can help for clients is actually the design of a study, and we can make it we understand, you know, what the permitting requirements are, and we can design a study to be cost effective. We can often get studies done in a shorter period of time. We can demonstrate to the agencies that you only need to collect a certain amount of data. So I think it really starts in the design of a study. The studies can support a wide variety
of projects with an environmental component. We have a whole group of water client who need to do various studies associated, whether it's a reservoir, drinking water, wastewater facilities. But then there's also a lot of clients in the power and industrial sector as well that need to acquire permits or do certain studies as part of permitting compliance. And so, yeah, that's sort of what we do best historically. We collect the data. We can fabricate the
equipment. We could execute the studies, and then we take that data and we turn it into, like, permit applications or design studies. For example, the team might support a federal or state regulatory agency to evaluate how a facility or proposed construction project might impact the water quality of a river or lake in the aquatic life within the body of water.
It could be a wastewater facility that discharges treated water into a stream, or a power company might be looking to relicense a hydroelectric plant or install new underwater cable. It could involve the impact of building a new bridge across the water or dredging the river to accommodate larger cargo ships. But a lot of the work evaluates the ongoing impact of existing facilities. So a lot of the work we do is for facilities that have cooling water intakes.
So they need to document how many larval fish and shellfish they're pulling in. So we would collect samples from that intake, bring them to our lab, identify and measure each of those fish to species. We would also can collect benthic samples, so taking grabs of sediment, either freshwater, estuarine, or marine, and then look at what organisms invertebrates are in the sediment. Again, identifying them to species if possible and putting that information into
reports. Then as Aaron reminded us, there's the fish. Historically, and I think what our group is most interested in is the fishery side of the environmental field. We've done population studies in New York Harbor and all its surrounding estuaries. Once a study is designed, it's time for the team to venture out in the field.
So a typical day out on a boat, whether you're doing fisheries work or water quality work, you're gonna start your day generally at our laboratory and pick up the supplies that you're gonna need for the day. That's Casey Stokes, an environmental scientist and field coordinator. His job involves being the conduit between a project team and the field staff, helping to select the right specialists and equipment for
each job. You may need some consumable supplies, ice to keep samples cold, gloves or formalin for the samples that you collect, certainly data sheets and labels and that type of stuff. And you'll head out to a marina and hop in a boat and have a set of sites that you need to hit for that day. Like many of his colleagues, Casey grew up on the water. I grew up along the shore of the Hudson River in Upstate New York, and we spent a lot of time outdoors and on the water when we could.
And then at 13, I asked my parents if I could get scuba certified, and, surprisingly, they said yes. We'd go down and see some wrecks or take one trip down to do some coral reef diving down in The Caribbean. I did end up working as a scuba diver for three years in the summers during college. Kinda paid my way through college. From there, Casey became more interested in learning about animals and plants,
leading to his career in environmental science. Each day on the job brings a new set of tasks requiring a methodical approach to work in the field. Every site that you're hitting, you're collecting date, time, weather, GPS location information, and then you have the sample itself. Maybe it's water sample. Maybe it's some readings that you take with a water quality instrumentation, or maybe it's some fisheries data.
And that may involve pulling fish up onto the boat with a net and then measuring them, weighing them, and then tossing them back. Or it might involve collecting ichthyoplankton fish eggs and larvae, putting them into a jar, putting formalin into the jar so they're preserved, and then labeling that so it can be brought back to the lab for Kate and her taxonomists
to identify. To do the job, Casey and his team need to know as much about the equipment they're using as the organisms they're studying. We have, a whole lot of handheld instrumentation that can just be dropped into the water for instant readings. We have data loggers that can be deployed and log internally and then recaptured to download. We've installed telemetry equipment that will send us data from the field in real time, either along the shorelines or in ponds, rivers,
and even off of buoys. Then there's the Doppler radar technology. We have used ADCPs extensively. That stands for acoustic Doppler current profiler. They basically emit sonar pulses and listen for the Doppler shift of the return signal bouncing back to it through the water column to determine water speed and direction. And we've used them to also map out in real time sediment plumes coming off of construction activity because the more sediment they disturb, the stronger the return signal is.
And quite a few other technologies. We've got a whole lot of GPS equipment, everything from kind of a lower accuracy handheld unit to high accuracy devices that can do horizontal and vertical positioning to within a couple centimeters. Those can be integrated onto a boat or used, for terrestrial applications. We've done bathymetry where we're measuring the depth of the water in a project area to inform design decisions or even combine that with the ADCP to map out how the
currents behave around a project site. And then we've got the drones on a pretty wide variety of projects, either collecting data or just collecting imagery. However, a lot of the equipment the team needs is so specialized that it requires someone like Aaron to get creative. If you're working in the environmental field, you know that a lot of the equipment is specialty equipment purposely
built for the task at hand. So it's either not available on the general market or it costs an arm and a leg to hire somebody to create and fabricate. More often than not, it's just not available. So we sort of purchased a welder and took on fabrication of our own. To take it and actually fabricate it is fun to do. It's rewarding, and you're creating something that just basically you can't go buy off the
shelf to get task done. When Aaron describes the team's fabrication work, it sounds very much like the neighbor who's always working on something in the garage, except his weekend projects involve some of the most sophisticated fisheries and water sampling technologies in the world. So some of our custom work is the boat setups, and I think that's where it initially started was building davits and a frames and winch mounts for the sampling gear. But a lot of the fabrication
is far more complex. We've built some custom low profile ADCP mounts, the acoustic Doppler current profile mounts, ADCP mounts, the acoustic Doppler current profile mounts. Casey was involved with this designing it and able to deploy these ADCPs subsurface with no surface buoys or anything leading up to the surface. So we'll put out a low profile mount with the ADCP attached to it to, say, a 50 foot pickup line with an anchor, and then we'll mark GPS cords at both the anchor and the unit
itself. And next time out, when we wanna service it, we throw out a grappling hook, grapple up that line, retrieve the ACP, download the data, and redeploy. Additional fabrications have included a customized van beam dredge to sample sediment off the river bottom, underwater video sleds, and an underwater video quadrant for submerged vegetation surveys.
Some of the team's unique fabrications are particularly innovative, including a mobile PFAS testing lab to test for harmful chemicals found in products like Teflon nonstick pans and a wicking well mechanism to remediate suspended solids such as metals or arsenic in groundwater. Though it sounds like a lot of work to essentially invent your own equipment, Casey and Aaron said it offers significant advantages
during a field study. Because everything's in house, we work very closely and have a lot of feedback between the fabrication side of things and the field side of things. So the field crew who are using it maybe have the better ideas for how it should perform. And then if something needs to change because of unexpected factors, then we can pretty quickly respond and make changes to our designs by bringing the gear back into the shop and
having them reworked. So we're always trying to come up with ideas on how to better what we're doing. And having those capabilities in house, we can make adjustments overnight. We can make adjustments over the weekend. We can do it on on-site. Yeah. Work smarter, not harder. From working in an advanced science lab to inventing new equipment in the fabrication shop to taking boats out on the Hudson River, the team's hands on work sounds like it would make the day go by quickly.
Not necessarily, Aaron said. Typically, folks here, fisheries work, boating, and this is the general public and family members, and they think it's all, you know, rainbows and sunshine. But we work through the harsh winter months, long cold days. We work through the summer months, the the heat of August, which is, in my opinion, as challenging, if not more challenging than the winter months. Quite often, these are long days days meaning fourteen plus hours.
A lot of our work on the water incorporate, tidal cycles. So if we need to hit a full tidal cycle, that's twelve plus hours on the water. Casey said the extreme conditions can make it difficult to perform what would typically be a simple task. I had a day where it was something like negative seven or or negative nine degrees Fahrenheit around there, and it was very windy.
And it was a challenge to keep the fish alive just to get them out of the water, measure them quick enough so that they're not freezing to your equipment, and then get them back in the water. One example involved a three mile signature bridge being constructed across the Hudson River. Anytime that there was any construction activities, we were required to be out there monitoring water quality. So the first couple years of this project, they chose to try to work through the winter
months here. And in the Northeast, we see, specifically on the Hudson River where this job was taking place, you run into a lot of icing and the freezing water temperatures. So quite often throughout this period of time, crews would come in. We'd have to de ice the boat and get the snow off it. We had keep bubblers in the marina. So, basically, it just keeps the water from freezing around the boat, and we'd spend up to two hours chipping our way out of the marina, breaking the ice in front of us
to get out of the marina. That adds an extra concern is that's great, you got out of the marina, but you spend six, eight hours in the water, you come back If the temperatures are such, that, area can refreeze in that time period. So we'd be faced with the challenge of breaking the ice to get back into the marina and safely back to harbor. Those conditions make it important to plan for the safety of
the team. Quite often with the freezing, you end up with the deck freezing, which becomes hazardous, so we're dealing with that, putting down melting agents or sand to create a attraction, freezing on the windshield, and visibility is always a concern there too. Some of the other that whether it's nice conditions or not, we do some harbor work overnights. So you're out in the harbor long days,
and you're working through the night. So that can be a challenge as well, just staying awake and paying proper attention for safety purposes. With such long days out on the water, Erin, Kate, and Dave recalled passing time between tides while waiting for the right conditions for the next sample. There's been downtime that we have hours to kill in between sample sets, and we'll cook up a little bit of food, maybe play a game of backgammon or whatnot or other online games that we now
have access to. I remember listening to one of the World Cup games waiting for some work activity to start. You do each what you can to to pass it by, but most times, it's a good time. I thought you were gonna say favorite pastime was to complain about the project manager. Nah. Nah. Come on, man. But, yes, that that could still you know, we could spend hours doing that. With the team doing such specialized environmental work, Dave said that the niche studies often lead to repeat business
and larger jobs. You know, a lot of times, our work with clients may start, with something that is a simple field study or data collection. And then, really, that type of information, that type of data, we demonstrate to the client our value and then using that data in reports. And then very often, that leads to future engineering design work at these facilities. So there really is that progression and that relationship.
One example involved a study to access how the deepening of navigation channels in New York, New Jersey harbor would affect aquatic habitats, especially that of the winter flounder. Dave's team had become quite proficient at data collection after years of research. Kate and her lab developed, I would call it innovative solutions. What we were actually able to do with these very small eggs and larvae under the microscope, we were able to identify what stage of growth
the eggs and larvae were in. So we're not only able to give information to the client, you have eggs and larvae, but we're also basically to tell how old these were and how developed they were. And that information became super helpful to sort of understanding what the winter flounder spawning was like in New York Harbor. And so this federal client was able to to design and execute their project in a way to minimize impacts. That work led to further scientific breakthroughs.
For many years, the prevailing thought within the scientific community, I'd go to scientific conferences. There was a belief that winter flounder eggs could not be collected by sampling gear because the eggs collect on the bottom. They're sticky. And so the belief was is that the eggs were out there, but they weren't able to be collected. As you might guess, that didn't stop this team. So several years ago, we fabricated some custom ichthyoplankton, which means eggs and larvae,
sampling equipment. So the aluminum sleds that were mentioned earlier, we attached a net to them so they were bottom oriented. They had skids on the bottom so that they slid along the bottom. And then we also experimented with what was called a tickler, chain, which was basically a chain in front of the net to sort of stir up the bottom. And lo and behold, doing these winter flounder studies over the years, we began collecting winter flounder eggs. Which Dave was proud to share with
the wider scientific community. And so I remember going to my first scientific conference and presenting these results, and there was some skepticism. But once I showed them the data, I showed them the photographs. We had the samples, the actual winter founder eggs in house in our collection. You know, that thought of not being able to collect winter founder eggs in the field has changed, and so I really feel I was a good example of leading the scientific
side of things. Some jobs involve looking at how nutrients such as phosphorus or nitrogen might be impacting aquatic habitats. Kate said that can lead to additional work with wastewater treatment operators. We just did a pretty big study in Jamaica Bay related to nitrogen, and we collected basically everything in that bay that we could from water to sediment to algae to invertebrates to understand the nutrients in that system and how they may have changed by some reductions
done by the city. And that data then went into some modeling. I feel like that job really brought a lot of field folks, modelers, engineers together, and it was a great way to network our field and lab and our our modeling. Microorganisms often get drawn into the water intakes of power plants that are drawn in water from the river for cooling, which has led to some interesting work for
the team. Aaron described at the deployment of a 15 foot boom with a mesh fabric stretching to the full depth of the water to prevent those organisms from getting trapped in the intake. It was probably the most challenging project I've been involved with here. These are organisms drifting in the currents and carried by
the currents away from the intakes. And, basically, they'd hit the net, they'd roll off or cling to it, and this system had a air burst system in involved and incorporated in it that would discharge air every, say, thirty minutes or hour to clear the sediment off of the net and any organisms back into the currents. Once again, this wasn't an
off the shelf solution. These were fourteen hour days, seven days a week once it started because you'd assemble this boom on land and use a series of boats and heavy equipment on land to shuffle the portion out into the river. Then you'd spend the next day or two assembling the next sections on land, all while the previous portion was out floating in the river. So to keep everything secured and in place was very, very challenging,
and there was no quit. You you could not stop once you started, so this would go on for a month plus for the installation and then the maintenance and monitoring throughout the season, the the breeding season. And then the removal process was just as tiring and and difficult. The team has also been involved with multiple oyster projects, including some related to the Billion Oyster Project.
The nonprofit's mission is to restore oyster reefs in New York Harbor to provide habitats and provide natural shoreline protection from waves, flooding, and erosion. Casey talked about his work in that area. The oyster work definitely tends to capture the public imagination because I've been in the newspaper for oyster work at HDR twice, and I've only worked on two oyster projects, one with
the HDR hardware. The stuff we did was up in the Hudson River, and there was some construction that was gonna be disturbing oyster bed. And we basically spent, I I wanna say, about a week straight just harvesting as many
oysters as we could and relocating them. I mean, we must have relocated thousands and thousands of oysters and pulling them up with rake style dredge and putting them into large buckets and then pretty quickly transporting them to a part of the river that wasn't gonna be disturbed by the construction to try to maintain as much of that community as we could. The team occasionally lends its fleet
to projects outside of the Tristate area. Typically, if we're sending a boat out to a remote location or somewhere across the country, we would be towing it, and it would come with an operator. I've personally trailed a boat as far North as Maine, as far South as Virginia, and as far West as Quad Cities. Having cross trained staff that have worked in the field, in the lab, and directly with engineers ultimately raises the level of everyone's work. The
lab is filled with professional scientists. Right? It's professional, you know, degreed scientists who are executing these projects, who have a larger understanding of the work and the context of it, I think, is really important. Because in the end, as a project manager, I understand that having those trained, experienced people
is a benefit to my project. We have staff that have twenty, thirty, forty years of general environmental field work, And that's a big asset and a tool that we often use tapping into some of the more experienced staff to get historic data or how they've done it in the past. And to have those tools and assets to us definitely help out because there's no substitute for experience. All that experience certainly gives the team a different perspective of
recreation on the water. For me, having spent so many hours on the water, I avoid boats in my off hours. Something that I I have friends with boats, and they could could not pay me to go out on their boat for a long period of time. More recently, over the last few years, I've learned to enjoy it again and and appreciate it. If I'm out on a friend's boat and whatnot and we got family, it's always nice to have the inside information that we all carry and be able to
share that. Yeah. I'd rather go on a kayak than a boat because the kayak can't break down. Yep. Absolutely. That's the large part of it. Sometimes you pinch yourself. You're you're heading out of the marina in Lower Manhattan seeing the skyline. Just realize how lucky you are that people will pay money for the for these type of, sightseeing tours and to be working in this area. But more than the adventure of the job or the intellectual pursuit of their research, perhaps what most drives the team
is their commitment to the environment. I I think for most of the folks we work with here and we're involved in this portion of the field, you know, or industry, they have a passion for what they're doing. They're not simply out here collecting a paycheck. I think it takes a lot more than that to be a good scientist and not just go out there to to
collect the data and go home. I think everybody has a personal interest in this at some level, whether it's in the environment, a local community of some sort that they wanna see better. But I I think it's a true passion that all of us carry for the environment. For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more
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