The evolution of environmental engineering: today's environmental engineer wears many hats.

• Author: White, Michele
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES

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Once upon a time the person known as the environmental engineer made sure water was safe to drink and wastewater and sewage was safely disposed of.

"In academia ... it was where chemistry and engineering came together," says Stewart Osgood, president of DOWL HKM, a civil engineering firm with 19 offices in six states, headquartered in Anchorage.

It is no longer that simple. Today's environmental engineer is part negotiator with government regulators, part community relations specialist meeting with scores of citizens and part designer. The work is generally categorized into two areas of professional services: a future impact side--assessing and documenting the environmental impact of development projects, and a clean-up side--designing remediation systems for society's messes. Within those boundaries, there are multiple specialties, services and disciplines that govern them.

For future impact work, the federal legislation known as the National Environmental Policy Act requires any project utilizing federal funds to address whether or not there will be environmental impacts caused by the project. The type of environmental documentation-and its details--corresponds to the size and the scope of the project.

"If you're building a pipeline from Alaska to Louisiana, it's obviously a huge project with significant impact," says John Hargesheimer, president of NORTECH Inc. in Fairbanks. "You would have to do a full-blown EIS (Environmental Impact Statement)."

Each project has a designated federal agency, which takes the lead on the project and is responsible for compliance with NEPA. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for any projects involving wetlands. However, a project can touch several different agencies. Each agency develops its own manual for how to accomplish NEPA compliance. The environmental professional will follow the criteria in those manuals and ensure that each agency involved concurs with their assessment in the environmental documentation before a project begins.

"Because of the emphasis now on the regulatory climate," Osgood says, "permitting and environmental documentation are now a big part of our work that falls under the heading environmental services. There's probably not an engineering component to that, or very little, but it's the environmental services features that are very important to get projects constructed."

It is that service that is one of DOWL HKM's strengths...