Monday, May 31, 2010

Two Weeks in the Life

It's been an interesting couple weeks with not much chargeability but lots of proposal, business development, and a little project management.  Here's a bullet point roundup:
  • We're going in as the environmental subconsultant for one of the largest dam removal projects in the country, located in Olympic National Park.  If we get the work, which doesn't seem likely, I'll have a key role in the project, which will stretch out for three years.  I've been working out some of the costs and scope of services.
  • Inked a master services agreement with a major real estate player in Seattle.
  • Prepared and submitted a proposal for a mold assessment update of a portfolio of properties located in California, Texas, and Florida.  We'll probably get this project and I'll do the three northern California properties, the same ones I did about four years ago.  This is a great road trip, fly into SJC, one property in the Bay Area, the next one in a Central Valley town, and the last one on the central coast.  It's a lot of driving but through some great country, with a side trip through Parkfield, California, a famous earthquake research area being on the boundary of the Pacific and North American crustal plates.
  • Steered a client away from doing $30,000 worth of subsurface investigation because it wouldn't yield much useful information.  Just too many physical constraints at the property, the building footprint covers just about the whole parcel.  The concerns are relatively low risk.  It pays in the long run to be a good, ethical consultant, providing the best advice a client can buy.
  • Under very short notice, scrambled to staff a project in the Bay Area from our office there, implementing a soil and groundwater management plan for some excavation work done by a tenant moving into one of our client's properties.
  • Got out and measured groundwater levels at one of my projects where there's some pretty significant chlorinated solvent contamination.  Groundwater appears to be moving in the opposite direction of what we expect, which is good for my client.  It rained the whole time, naturally, but I had rain gear.

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