Layne is a Staff Professional with Antea Group, an environmental consulting firm that specializes in problem solving for various markets including oil and gas, railroad, food and beverage, and many others. One of Layne’s recent projects was leading the operations and maintenance for a remediation system at an old oil shipping barge dock in Superior, WI. She recommends this career for anyone looking to get “hands-on” experience while making the environment a bit safer for the rest of us!
Transcript
My name is Layne Kortbein, I'm a Staff Professional at Antea Group. It's a generic title and my background is in environmental engineering. So, Antra Group is an environmental consulting firm. We have 27 offices in the United States, and then we're also located nationwide. So environmental consulting in itself is a mix of problem solving for different market segments. Market segments include the oil and gas industry, the railroad industry, food and beverage sector, and a couple others that we work in. So one of the most interesting projects that I worked on this last spring and summer was in Superior, Wisconsin. It was for a former oil shipping barge dock, and it has a lot of history with it, about 30-year remediation history. And what we do, we have a remediation system up there that skims, it's called LNAPL, which is Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid. And what that does is it skims off product that contains gasoline or hydrocarbons off the top of the ground water that was spilled historically. And so we go up there in the spring/summer every week or so. And then I was in charge of operation and maintenance of the skimming system, and then also problem solving and troubleshooting the things that came with that. So when we get there, we get trained in with a Staff Professional or Project Professional. And we learn how to sample the different soil, water, vapor. Get trained in on that. And then after that, we do solo journeys, or if it's a larger area that we're working with or project we're working with, we also go down with another person still. Yeah, I think generally starting out you will be kind of juggling different projects. You'll get to see various sectors, either of the report writing, which is after the data comes in, then we have to simplify it into a report to send out to the client. And then you're also working on the technical aspect of it and you're doing the sampling. And so that sampling you'll be doing for multiple projects and it's a lot of juggling where you have to keep track of what you're doing, what stage you're at with that project, but then you can also continue on and see the completion of that project, as well.
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