Profiles | ARRA

It’s a good thing Adam Dietmeyer is one of those guys who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. For the past five months, Dietmeyer and his fellow DelHur Industries employees have been digging and dumping nearly 1.8 million cubic yards of soil at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF).

Dietmeyer is a heavy equipment operator for DelHur, a Washington Closure Hanford subcontractor based in Port Angeles, Washington. DelHur has completed excavation of ERDF’s first super cell, work supported with dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Previously, ERDF was expanded two disposal areas, or cells, at a time. Design upgrades have allowed for the two cells to be combined into one super cell. Super cell 9 measures 500 feet wide, 1,000 feet across, and 70 feet deep at the base.

“It’s not very glamorous work, but it’s got to be done,” said Dietmeyer, who has been operating heavy equipment for the past 15 years.

Dietmeyer, who has worked for various construction companies in western Washington over the years, was hired by DelHur in June 2008. His first job with DelHur was to help build an 8-mile hauling road near Curlew, Washington, a small community located in the northwest part of the state.

In September 2008, Dietmeyer was assigned to ERDF, where DelHur was excavating cells 7 and 8. He operates nearly every piece of equipment – excavators, payhaulers, bulldozers, and graders.

“I do it all. Whatever they ask me to do, I’ll do. I know people who are looking for work, so I’m glad I have a place to go every morning,” Dietmeyer said of the project.

Dietmeyer said he’s been impressed with DelHur, which also constructed cells 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 7 and 8 at the facility.

“It’s a very good company,” he said. “They really care about their employees. If you need something to help do your job or if you’ve got something to deal with at home, they’ll go the extra mile for you.” 

Bob Fahlberg does not need to worry about getting his daily exercise. As a field investigator for the waste sites project team at WCH, Fahlberg conducts systematic foot-based land surveys (walkdowns) to identify potential waste sites in the River Corridor.

Under the ARRA work scope, Fahlberg recently led a walkdown of six waste sites at IU2/IU6 Segment 1 to collect site-specific information, such as the waste site dimensions. Results will help determine if a potential site needs to be cleaned up. If so, it will be added to the list for remediation.

Systematic walkdowns are used within reactor/operational areas to identify and document potential waste sites and to follow up on potential sites identified by reviewing historical documents. Geophysical surveys are also used in target areas as part of some field investigations.

Fahlberg and fellow project team member Mark Lambert conduct walkdowns using a reference grid system that measures about 100 by 100 feet. They walk lines 50 feet apart looking for anything that looks suspicious and might need to be investigated. They also use hand-held global positioning system units and digital cameras to record locations.

“We get great coverage, so we don’t miss anything,” said Fahlberg, who has worked on the project since 1994.

Within inter-areas, such as IU2/IU6 Segment 1, the waste sites project team uses digital high resolution aerial photographs (fly-overs) as well as light detection and ranging imagery to conduct “virtual walkdowns.” Areas are then selected to conduct the same type of foot-based surveys used in reactor/operational areas.

“The fly-overs make it much easier to survey the large, remote areas,” Fahlberg said. “Walking areas like IU2/IU6 (100-IU-2/IU-6 area covers 91603.68 acres) would take forever.” 

Not long ago, Josh Green was a part of a U.S. Army combat patrol team, searching Iraq for roadside bombs and high-profile al-Qaida. So you can bet Green takes safety very seriously, and that makes him a perfect fit to work at the challenging and highly hazardous 618-10 Burial Ground.

Green was hired in July by Eberline Services Hanford, a Washington Closure subcontractor, as a Radiological Control Technician (RCT). After spending about six months working at D Area, he was assigned to 618-10 as nonintrusive radiological characterization activities began. Work at 618-10 is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“This is by far the best job I’ve ever had,” said Green, a Richland native who worked at Perma-Fix Northwest before joining Washington Closure. “The people I’ve worked with at Eberline and Washington Closure really know their stuff, and everybody is committed to safety. We don’t take any chances.”

Green is part of a team that is characterizing 94 vertical pipe units, or VPUs, which contain highly radioactive and chemical waste generated from the 300 Area during the 1950s and early 1960s.

To begin characterization, Green removes the cap of a cone penetrometer and checks it for contamination – this is a long, narrow steel tube that allows the instrumentation to be lowered in to the area surrounding the VPU – and takes a count. He then attaches smear pads to a survey probe that is lowered to the full depth of the tubing (about 22 feet). As the probe is retrieved, Green performs a direct survey, wipes the cable with a large area wipe and takes the counts.
Once the probe reaches the surface, he performs a contamination check of the large area wipe.

If no contamination is found, a multi-detector probe (MDP), specifically designed for use at the 618-10 and 618-11 burial grounds, is deployed. Measurements are taken at 1-foot increments until the MDP reaches the surface. Green takes a swipe at each increment and performs a contamination check of the probe when it reaches the surface.

As a new technician, Green is also learning more complex tasks such as air sample analysis for personnel- and general-area air monitoring. Each member of his team must be cross-qualified to perform all the vital functions for ensuring workers are provided with the radiation and contamination protection needed to keep all employees in a safe environment.

“It might not sound too exciting, but it’s very important work,” Green said. “I’m helping determine the best way to clean up the burial ground while keeping everybody safe.”

Green joined the National Guard in 1999 and was activated in October 2003. He spent one year training at Fort Lewis, Washington; Fort Irwin, California; and Kuwait before being deployed to Iraq. For the next year, Green was part of the infantry combat patrol team. Green later served a second tour in Iraq and returned home in 2008.
 

Zac Leach is ready to buy some furniture, hook up his TV, and watch his beloved Cincinnati Bengals make their playoff push.

“I’ve finally got a place to call home,” said Leach, who began work last month as a safety specialist for North Wind Inc., a subcontractor of WCH. His position was made possible by ARRA funding.

Leach is a native of Summerfield, Ohio, a town of about 300 in the southeastern part of the state. Since graduating from Ohio State University four years ago with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural business and economics, the 26-year-old has literally been on the move.

His previous job as a safety coordinator with Layne Christensen Company took him to Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix, Arizona. Leach also spent a great deal of time working on a project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Layne Christensen is a Kansas City-area company that specializes in resource exploration and production.

“I would usually spend about five days a month at home,” Leach said. “I was always out of town working on a project. I’m ready for some stability.”

Leach was hired to work at the 618-10 Burial Ground, considered one of the most complex burial grounds at Hanford.

“I flew up in October to meet everyone and see what the project was all about,” Leach said. “The selling point for me was the people.  From WCH to North Wind, the 618-10 project is surrounded with great people.  It’s a pleasure to work with this group.”

Leach joined the project just before North Wind began installing 100 cone penetrometers in a selection of waste trenches at the burial ground. Cone penetrometers are steel tubes that will house the instruments used to determine the type, amount, and distribution of radioactive materials within the waste trenches.

North Wind employees are installing cone penetrometers around 94 vertical pipe units at the burial ground. During the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Hanford workers dumped highly radioactive waste into the VPUs, which typically consist of five bottomless 55-gallon drums welded end to end.

“I’m really enjoying the job,” Leach said. “It’s pretty cool to be able to tell your friends and family that you’re helping to clean up the old Manhattan Project work sites.”

Brandon Nixon isn’t one to sit around and wait for something exciting to happen. He likes to get out and go. Last year, he competed in a half-Ironman, a grueling event where competitors start with a 1.2-mile swim, bike 59 miles, then finish with a 13.1-mile run. And this year, he’s training to run his first marathon.

Nixon enjoys a fast-paced profession, too. That’s why he considers himself a perfect fit at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF), where he’s been working for the past 18 months as a project controls engineer.

ERDF is constantly changing. The excavation of the facility’s first super cell was recently completed, and work soon will begin to dig another. A new refueling station, two new maintenance facilities, and the expansion of the existing truck maintenance facility are in the works. On top of that, ERDF receives about 400 waste containers per day.

The work Nixon is doing helps support a $100 million expansion and upgrade of ERDF, which is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“There is always something interesting going on around here, so that keeps me on my toes,” said Nixon, who graduated from the University of Idaho in 2008 with a degree in finance and production and operations management.

Nixon works with schedules, tracks costs – everything to keep projects on track, on time, and within budget. “I’m responsible for all the facility and equipment upgrades,” he said.

Rick Caulfield, a project manager at ERDF, said he has been impressed with Nixon’s initiative.

“Brandon is always willing to learn. He wants to know everything he can, and not just about project controls, but the entire project,” Caulfield said. “He’s like a sponge.”

Not long ago, Nixon had never even heard of the Hanford Area. The Coeur d’Alene native had been to the Tri-Cities only one time, and that was years ago for a tennis tournament. He was turned on to Washington Closure at a university career fair during his senior year at Idaho.

“I’ve always been interested in construction and project management, so WCH sounded great,” Nixon said. “Once I got here, I found the people to be very friendly and willing to share what they knew. I think I made a great choice.”
 

Theresa Queen is part of ARRA-funded projects to determine if 66 potential waste sites along the Columbia River need to be cleaned up.

As a scientist working on sample design and cleanup verification, she helps create sample designs and analyze waste sites to determine if they contain radioactive or chemically contaminated materials that require remediation. These sites include buried pipelines, accidental spills, debris pits, suspect underground storage tanks, and soils around former buildings.

Theresa, who grew up in Richland and attended Hanford High School, graduated in 2008 from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, with a bachelor’s degree in biology. She worked during school breaks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she completed a post-bachelor’s research assistantship. While at PNNL, Theresa worked in the subsurface flow and transport laboratory.

However, when it came time to begin her professional career, Queen was ready to trade her lab coat for a hard hat and work boots.

“I wanted to get some experience away from the lab,” said Theresa, who began working at WCH in May. “I like my job at Washington Closure because it gives me an opportunity to get out in the field. I have a nice mix of office and field work.”

Queen is working on initial planning for confirmatory sampling of the 66 waste sites, and is currently developing sampling instructions for waste sites at the 100-D Area. This work includes drafting a list of potential contaminants to be sampled and determining contaminant locations. While it is clear that some of these sites were used as burn pits and tar dumps, it is not known what other sites might contain or whether they even need to be cleaned. 

Rule Steel does not mind a little trash talking. In fact, you could say garbage is one of its specialties.

Rule Steel and its 125 employees are based in Caldwell, Idaho. They design and fabricate tanks, structural and miscellaneous steel for buildings, waste and recycling containers, and stainless steel wine fermentation bins.

The company recently completed its second order of 150 roll-on/roll-off waste containers to Washington Closure Hanford. Three containers, paid for with Recovery Act dollars, were delivered each day from late September through early December to the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF).

Rule Steel, which provided the first order of 150 containers to WCH last year, worked closely with ERDF Operations Manager Jeff Armatrout and his staff to develop the containers.

“The unique part of this order was that we worked in conjunction with Jeff and his staff to provide a container designed and stamped by a professional engineer,” said Tim Keith, a sales manager at Rule Steel.

The containers are used to transport chemically and radioactively contaminated material such as soil, concrete, steel debris, and demolished piping. The contaminated material is loaded into the containers near the excavation or demolition sites and transported to ERDF, where the contents are dumped. The new containers were necessary to accommodate increasing waste generated by Washington Closure and other Hanford contractors.

The containers are 20 feet long, about 8½ feet wide and nearly 5 feet high. They weigh 7,600 pounds and can load up to 60,000 pounds, which includes the container and waste.

Keith said his company, which is celebrating its 50-year anniversary, values its working relationship with WCH.

“The people at WCH have been a real pleasure to work with,” Keith said. “In today’s difficult economy, our number one goal is to keep our people working, and an order like this helps us do that.” 

Laura Shikashio’s career has taken her all over the map, and now she’s back in an old stomping ground ready for an exciting new venture.

Shikashio is an Idaho native with extensive experience working on government contracts, especially remediation and waste management. She has lived and worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Richland, Washington; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Washington, D.C.; Houston, Texas; and Somerset, England. She has also worked on projects in Oklahoma, California, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Last year, Shikashio returned to Richland to launch a small engineering firm called Sage Tec. Sage Tec was recently awarded the contract for the design of a new gasoline and diesel fueling station at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF). Sage Tec’s prime
on the project is WHPacific, an Anchorage, Alaska-based company with a regional office in Richland. The fueling station is part of an estimated $100 million being spent on ERDF expansions and upgrades funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“It’s been great to get to know some of the people at Washington Closure Hanford and to be a part of the interesting work at ERDF,” Shikashio said. “With my experience in waste management, I know what it takes to put an operation like this together.”

Shikashio, a University of Idaho graduate, began her professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she concentrated on project controls management for research and development projects there.

She moved to Richland in the mid-1970s to work as a contracts specialist for Battelle, and she served in many capacities for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and CH2M Hill.

In 1989, Shikashio accepted a position to work for Admiral James Watkins, the U.S. Secretary of Energy under George H.W. Bush. She was part of Watkins’ team that established the Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management within DOE.

Shikashio also worked for Waste Control Specialists in Houston, and she spent two years in Somerset, England, working for Magnox South Limited, which is defueling and decommissioning five of the United Kingdom’s historic Magnox nuclear reactors.
Now, though, she’s glad to be back in a more familiar place.

“I’m ready for the challenges of running my own company,” said Shikashio, who has about a half dozen specialists under her direction. “We’ve got some great people with valuable Hanford experience. We’re very excited about our work.” 

Debbie Talbot is an administrator for the Waste Operations construction management team, a position created with Recovery Act funding.

Talbot is stationed at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility, the Hanford Site’s home for low-level radioactive, hazardous, and mixed waste. One of her job perks is a front-row seat as WCH subcontractor Delhur Industries Inc. digs a super cell that measures 70 feet deep, 500 feet wide, and 1,000 feet long.

It wasn’t long ago, however, that Talbot had to dig herself out of a gigantic hole.

Her misfortune began in March 2008, when she lost her job with Performance Abatement Services. The company had completed work to remove asbestos-containing materials at N Area and no longer needed her services.

Talbot was a Hanford veteran, having worked since 1976 in some capacity for companies such as J.A. Jones, Rockwell, and Morrison Knudsen Corporation, as well as for the Washington Public Power Supply System. Suddenly, she was desperate.

“It was a time when it seemed like absolutely nobody was hiring. I couldn’t find a thing,” Talbot said.

Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of a trying year. Not long after she lost her job, Talbot was hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening lung condition that occurs when there is severe fluid buildup in both lungs. She spent 10 days at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland before being airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she would spend another six weeks.

“I was in a coma for 10 days,” Talbot said. “Things got so bad that the doctors told my sons I might not make it.”

But, after a few months, Talbot began to improve and eventually regained enough strength to rejoin the working world. After applying for “every single job that popped up,” she landed with WCH in June.

“No job, no benefits … ARRA came at just the right time,” said Talbot, who helps process subcontract documents. “It was like the job just fell from the sky.”   

George Toolson, who goes by Pete, was lured back to the Hanford Site by a new job at an old burial ground. He was hired by WCH to work with subcontractor, NorthWind Inc. as a Quality Assurance Engineer at the 618-10 Burial Ground. His job, which is funded by Recovery Act dollars, is to ensure that all items affecting quality are followed and standards are met during activities at 618-10.

Pete has used his quality assurance, regulatory compliance, and safety background in counterterrorism, transportation, and other highly sensitive, visible, and high consequence projects during his 30-year professional career.

But he said his new job at WCH is as challenging and gratifying as they come. “I like the challenge of working on such an important project,” he said. “It’s very rewarding to know you are helping to protect the environment and keep everybody safe.” 

Pete is a native of Garden Grove, California. He first came to the Tri-Cities to help start Ben Franklin Transit (BFT) and served as the fleet and facilities maintenance manager for BFT, which began operations in 1981.

In 1989, he moved to Westinghouse Hanford as a senior transportation specialist. He also served as an instructor for the DOE National Transportation Safety Program and associate instructor for the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Transportation Safety Institute (TSI) in Oklahoma City. Pete later spent three years working for Fluor at Hanford’s K Basins.

He took on a new challenge in 2003 when he accepted a job as a QA engineer for the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security in Las Vegas. He received training as an explosives technician, firearms instructor, and other fields.

When the QA position at 618-10 was posted last year, Pete jumped at the opportunity. Having spent much of his career travelling – up to 40 weeks a year on the road and visiting more than 100 DOE sites – he welcomed the chance to return to the Pacific Northwest.

“We’ve raised three daughters in the Tri-Cities, so it’s a special place for my family,” Pete said. “I enjoy the people I work with at WCH. ARRA is a great deal for me.”

Pete earned a degree in diesel technology and engineering at Rancho Santiago Community College in Santa Ana, California, then studied industrial education at Brigham Young University.

He later participated in a Masters Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in crisis and emergency management as it relates to events of national significance (e.g., radiological, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction).   

The Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility is a beehive of activity. Haul trucks, water trucks, bulldozers, and dump trucks are in constant motion at Hanford’s low-level radioactive and mixed-waste landfill.

And, as increasing amounts of cleanup waste are disposed by WCH and other Hanford contractors, expansion and upgrades are in high gear, too.

All the commotion makes Tim Wintle feel right at home. “I like the fast-paced projects,” said Wintle, who joined WCH in July as a senior engineer. “We plan the project, start the job, and get it done.” 

Wintle’s opportunity to work in such an environment was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

He previously worked for a Boise engineering firm specializing in residential and commercial subdivision projects but was unemployed at the time he was hired. He found out about WCH through a friend who is tied into the Project Management Institute network.

“I guess I’m a poster boy for ARRA,” said Wintle, who holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from California State University in Chico, California.

Wintle describes his new job as “working on all the small projects” in support of ERDF operations. These projects include the construction of access ramps and preliminary designs for relocating a water-fill station, as well as building a new septic system, fueling station, and main entrance to ERDF.

Wintle also provided construction and engineering support for the creation of a container transfer area used by other Hanford contractors.

One of his latest projects was the pavement design of the back road into the facility, which will improve safety and traffic flow for other Hanford contractor waste shipments for disposal.