Mack Adams – Construction Sciences
My name is Mack and I am an Early Career Environmental Consultant working at Construction Sciences.
The day is the 18th of July 2024 and our team is kicking off a Detailed Site Investigation (DSI) at a 4 hectare site south of Brisbane. The site had historically received over ~60,000m3 of Fill and Waste material in the mid-1900s atop naturally occurring potential acid sulphate soils, and therefore presented various challenges that the developer needed to understand prior to commencing works.
The workday begins at 7:30am when our team arrives on site and is greeted by landowner and construction company representatives. After a 15-minute pre-start and a bit of paperwork, we set up a Sampling Station at the centre of the site and an excavator and drill-rig begin advancing test pits and boreholes at the nominated locations.
My role for the day involves material characterisation, field screening and sample collection of borehole materials. This role involves careful examination and logging of the undisturbed tubes of material (as pictured below); the soil type, indicators of potential contamination, and field readings were all recorded. Once the material has been characterised, I begin collecting various samples in accordance with the project’s Sampling, Analysis and Quality Plan.
Come 12:00pm, our team takes a well-deserved lunch break at a takeaway restaurant down the road, then we head back to site. Before restarting works, we have a quick debrief on the day’s progress.
During the day we find various pieces of glass, brick, coal ash, plastic, Styrofoam, and tin in the fill materials, identify a nest of Fire Ants on the site, and observe natural grey clays with orange mottling emitting a subtle rotten egg odour (a strong indicator of Acid Sulphate Soils).
The day wraps up just after 4:30pm which allows me time to put together a COC, before dropping the day’s samples to the laboratory for analysis.
I most enjoy the broad spectrum of work we are exposed to in the Contaminated Land Industry, with a regular day ranging from: soil sampling to client meetings, site supervision to report writing, groundwater monitoring to tender submission, or a site inspection in Townsville to a work-from-home day in my trackies. It’s hard to be bored at work with the variety, challenges, and opportunities a ‘regular day’ provides.
