Geo-Environmental Services
Subadra has just completed environmental investigations at a portfolio of 25 retail petrol filling station sites on behalf of a major oil company. The project was brought to completion on time and on budget, using a combination of our own drilling equipment, our in-house UKAS accredited laboratory and reported by our highly experienced consultants.
Contract Value: £100-200k
…of Central London in this case. Subadra has completed a week of pile probing at a cramped development site in Central London. Despite obstacles such as leaking water mains, piling rigs and deep excavations we successfully probed sixty locations to verify the presence of below ground obstacles that might impede the construction of the engineers’ piled foundation solution and contiguous boundary piles. The contractor used this information to target additional ground clearance the key areas of concern.
Contract value: <£5k
Allotment holders in Great Kingshill are rejoicing at the results of our recent soil testing that has confirmed the soil at the site is not contaminated as a result of fly-tipping and that they don’t have to pull up their winter brassica. The sprouts for Christmas dinner have been saved! For more details see Bucks Free Press.
….to get your own water well. The BBC reports today that energy and water bills are set to rise for the next 17 years so it makes ever more economic sense to have your own private water well installed. Subadra offer a ‘turnkey’ solution, dealing with everything from the initial (free) hydrogeological appraisal, applications and permits to drilling the well, installing the pump and connecting to your existing water supply. If you would like to know more please contact Duncan Eastland.
Environmental planning conditions are commonplace in brownfield development and much of our work is involved in the negotiation of discharge of such conditions. We have developed excellent relationships with Planning Authorities and Environment Agency/Scottish Environment Protection Agency over the years and enjoy a good success rate in planning condition discharge.
Earlier in the year Subadra were commissioned to assist in a significant phased retail development on the south coast of England. The site is within Zone I of a Source Protection Zone, overlies Chalk and is 40m from surface water. In other words it is in an extremely environmentally sensitive location. Initial investigation works had identified diesel and waste oil in shallow groundwater under the site.
This is where owning our own drill rigs and our own laboratory comes into play! We were able to delineate and characterise the contamination, and install sentinel wells within a month and without delaying the build programme. As a result of our detailed assessment, we’ve negotiated a long-term remedial solution for the site, installed the required groundworks and construction works have commenced.
Otherwise known as ‘understand your audience’.
We have recently completed a highly complex site investigation and detailed risk assessment of a public amenity site on behalf of a Local Authority. Our technical report, however, needed to be understood by a wide range of stakeholders, including regulators, consultants, site users and the general public. We used a range of graphical presentation methods in our report, cut the industry acronyms to a minimum and offered a report written in ‘plain English’. The result? Clear advice and a happy client, who described our report as ‘a model of site investigation & risk assessment communication’.
It has become increasingly common in recent years for filling station operators to rely on remote wetstock monitoring to detect possible leaks in their system. Tank and pump gauges are monitored remotely with sophisticated trend analysis used to detect abnormal behaviour. These systems can be very good, but they aren’t infallible.
Last year Subadra were retained to clean up contamination resulting from a leak at a filling station. Our treatment was completed successfully over the winter months and by mid-summer we had started post-remedial monitoring, with groundwater samples taken at monthly intervals from monitoring wells we had installed at the site.
Our consultants noticed some anomalous results appearing and, in best CSI fashion, our laboratory carried out a programme of forensic analysis. This was able to determine the ‘age’ of the contamination we were finding, telling us how long the leaked fuel had been in the ground. This confirmed that the wells were being contaminated from a new source.
The site’s real-time remote wetstock monitoring was checked but didn’t show a leak at the site. However, on our advice, the site operator had the tanks and lines pressure tested and this identified a steady slow leak from one of the pumps. Repairs were carried out limiting the volume of fuel lost into the ground.
The moral of the tale? Well, remote wetstiock monitoring is very good and we would certainly recommend it. But it’s not infallible. In those cases, forensic analysis can help identify leaks that wetstock monitoing misses.
If you’d like to know more about our forensic analysis service or any of the other services offered by our UKAS/MCerts accredited laboratory please contact Kate Clark.
Subadra have been retained by a major food wholesaler/distributor to carry out a comprehensive audit/investigation of the fuel storage and supply infrastructure at a multi-site portfolio across the UK. Key to winning the contract was our ability to complete the project within a tight timescale. This is only possible because of our unique approach whereby every aspect of the project will be carried out using in house resources, from borehole drilling through to laboratory analysis; and, of course, our competitive rates!
Sometimes you need a detailed ground investigation with large numbers of boreholes, utilising a variety of different investigation tools (drill rigs, plate bearing tests, pile probing etc), with data collected and assimilated over a period of days or even weeks, that delivers a detailed description of site geology and provides a well defined contaminant delineation.We can do this for you.
However, sometimes you need a basic no frills contamination survey that is both cost effective and done on a very fast turnaround.Here at Subadra we own and operate our own survey team, drill rigs, chemical analysis laboratory in addition to our team of highly skilled geotechnical and environmental consultants that are responsible for collating, assessing and the reporting the data we produce. This means we can carry out high quality, cost effective Phase One and Two contamination surveys within days.This service proves invaluable for may of out clients who are always on the lookout to purchase new sites to add to their portfolio and don’t want to lose out on a lucrative deal or, perhaps worse, get caught out by discovering contamination issues after the site has been purchased.
When we discovered that Year 3/4 at St Mary’s CE Primary School in Amersham were learning about soils as their science topic this term we were pleased to put one of our drill rigs to a slightly more educational use. We offered to drill a shallow borehole in the playing field to demonstrate the soil profile below the school. We provided three soil cores in plastic liners for later inspection in class. Our drill team has never been cheered on by anyone before – perhaps there are a few budding engineering geologists in Amersham.