Meet Jessica Smith!

Aspect is excited to welcome Jessica Smith, LG to our team. Jessica is a Senior Geologist supporting Aspect’s Environmental group out of our Seattle office. She is a proven environmental project manager with experience leading complex, high-profile, multi-disciplined projects for both private and public sector clients including the Amazon Headquarters Multi-City Block Redevelopment and the Washington State Convention Center Addition. Jessica has developed an expertise in due diligence, site assessment, and remediation of upland urban brownfield redevelopment sites. Here are five questions we asked to get to know her better:

1. Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? I was born in Littleton, Colorado and moved to the Pacific Northwest when I was 8. I grew up in Bellingham but also lived near Salt Lake City for a few years in junior high and high school. After college my husband and I moved to the Redmond area and have been here ever since. I have lived in the PNW for the majority of my life and consider it home!

2. What inspired you to pursue geology? What made you curious about it? I started college as an English major with an emphasis on technical and creative writing. Spring quarter of my sophomore year I took a Geology 101 course for a general science credit and really enjoyed it.  My professor talked me into taking a Geology field course that summer in California, which I absolutely loved. When I got back from the trip I immediately changed my major, signed up for all the math and science I hadn’t taken, enrolled in summer school to not fall behind and graduated (on time!) with a Geology degree!

3. What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated? I enjoy working on challenging, fast paced and team-focused projects. I love the satisfaction that comes from working with my colleagues, clients, contractors, regulators and other consultants to solve problems and reach our end goals. I am also a visual person and get satisfaction from presenting technical data in a graphic way that is easy to understand.

4. What do you like to do when you aren’t working? When I’m not working I’m usually hanging out with my husband, our two kids, Caden (7) and Clara (4) and our black lab, Porter (9).  We love to travel, hike, camp, and on sunny PNW days you can almost always find us boating on Lake Sammamish.

5. Where in the world would you like to travel next? I love to travel and, since my husband is a pilot, get to do it quite a bit! I’m looking forward to someday exploring Italy and Greece, relaxing on the beaches in Thailand and heading back to Ireland and Scotland!

Prominent Environmental Leader Dave Cook Joins Aspect Consulting in Seattle

Principal Geologist Dave Cook, LG, CPG joins Aspect’s Seattle Office, providing clients an established, innovative, and creative earth science advisor. Dave’s 25-year track record of applying new solutions and technologies to old problems is highly regarded by business clients, the community, and fellow environmental firms and regulators.

Principal Geologist Dave Cook joins Aspect Consulting, LLC in Seattle, adding strength and depth of experience to Aspect’s urban development capabilities. As a leader in the Puget Sound community, Dave’s 25-year career has included high-profile and complex projects for the region’s most prominent businesses. He thrives in unique situations where there are multiple stakeholders and when clearly communicating complex technical issues to business leaders, legal experts, regulators, and the public is critical to successful outcomes. He is sought after for his combination of technical acumen and innovative application of financing and risk management tactics to help business owners and communities develop cost effective solutions that put distressed sites back to productive use.

“Working with Dave as a regional colleague has always been a pleasure, and I’m excited to have him join forces with us at Aspect. Collaboration and strategic thinking come naturally to Dave as he integrates environmental, geotechnical, and construction know-how with great skill. Daily interaction with a professional of his caliber makes us all stronger,” says Doug Hillman, Aspect’s Environmental Practice Lead.

Deep down, Dave’s heart and soul is founded in bettering the communities for which he and his clients embed themselves. In addition to being at forefront of his earth science and environmental practice, he’s been a leader with Engineers Without Borders-USA (www.ewb-usa.org) for over 10 years. As the 2016 Board President of this 15,000-person volunteer organization, Dave helps lead the organization and facilitate partnerships with industry partners. He’s also traveled to Bolivia and Peru to support water supply projects and been a mentor to the University of Washington EWB chapter. Recently, he coordinated EWB-USA’s response to a unique geohazard assessment after the devastating earthquake in Nepal.

“I’m excited to join the Aspect team. It’s a firm composed of very skilled practitioners that I’ve admired through interactions on various projects. I get energized collaborating with clients and bringing a team of experts to the table to solve tough problems. The Aspect team gives me an opportunity to do more of that. I’ll also be focused on introducing clients to a more creative set of solutions through my established environmental practice while branching out into water and geohazard skills that I developed early in my career and have blossomed again through my volunteer work with EWB-USA,” Dave said.

Formerly a Principal Geologist with GeoEngineers, Dave has over 25 years of environmental consulting experience, with focused expertise in urban brownfields redevelopment, site acquisition, remedial cost estimation, cleanup, environmental strategy and regulatory liaison. Dave has led many large, complex environmental projects in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, including Amazon’s revitalization of South Lake Union and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Headquarters, which received a 2014 American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) national engineering award.

Join Aspect at the NEBC 2016 Northwest Remediation Conference

Aspect is once again a proud sponsor and participant in this year’s Northwest Remediation Conference held October 4th in Seattle, WA. For session 2A, “Implementing Combined Remedies,” Senior Remediation Engineer, Adam Griffin, will discuss how, why, and with what results remediation technologies have been deployed at complex sites.  Later in the day, join Carla Brock, Aspect’s Associate Geologist, as she moderates a panel of remediation professionals and regulators on the challenges they face when mitigating surface water contamination.

The conference is presented by the Northwest Environmental Business Council, “a regional trade association representing leading service and technology firms who are working to protect, restore, and sustain the natural and built environment.”

Learn more about the conference HERE. 

Tim Flynn talks Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) at the NGWA Conference in Portland

This September 8-9 the National Groundwater Association will host the “Connecting the Dots…Groundwater, Surface Water, and Climate Connections” conference in Portland, Oregon.  This 2-day conference will focus on the connections between groundwater, surface water, and climate in the area encompassing Washington, Idaho, Oregon, northern California, and British Columbia.

Aspect’s president and principal hydrogeologist Tim Flynn will present on day two of the conference in the Drought Resilience/Water Availability/Scarcity portion of the conference. He will be presenting on Aquifer Storage and Recovery and will examine the challenges and opportunities of ASR. Learn more about the conference HERE.

Meet our Portland Staff!

Aspect is not only launching a new Portland office, we're also welcoming new staff with expert knowledge of the region. Peter Stroud joins us as a Senior Associate Engineering Geologist with over 30 years of experience on engineering, engineering geologic, geotechnical, and environmental projects. Mark Swank joins us as a Senior Engineering Geologist with over 14 years of experience performing engineering and geologic analysis for schools, dams, and infrastructure projects in the greater Portland area. Here are five questions we asked to get to know them better. 

Pete Stroud

1.       Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? I was born in a small town north of San Francisco and grew up in Sacramento. After going to college and working in northern California for several years, my wife and I took a 10-month trip to explore Alaska, Canada, and travel around the US. At the end of the trip, we thought we’d settle in the Pacific Northwest. We both had good college friends who lived in Portland. We stopped to visit and never left—we’ve lived here now for 29 years!

2.       What inspired you to pursue geology? What made you curious about it? From an early age, I enjoyed backpacking—particularly the above-timberline, glaciated, granitic Sierra Nevada mountains. I loved the out-of-doors and for college I applied to be a forestry major. It was so popular at my chosen college that there were no spots available! I took advantage that the college had openings for the “undeclared” major.  I took Intro to Geology my first term and really enjoyed it. The Department Chair encouraged me to declare being a geology major.  I never regretted the decision, and I realized it wasn’t the forest that turned me on, it was those rocky mountains!

3.       What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated? Geology has so many applications, and as a result I’ve been a geologist in so many types of projects: mineral exploration, watershed restoration, groundwater supply, fluvial geomorphology, landslide mapping and mitigation, geotechnical engineering, environmental assessments and cleanup, and dam removals. The variety of projects keeps work interesting and there’s always more to learn. Also in my personal time, it’s great to look around at the landscape, evaluate the geomorphology, and try to figure out what geologic processes shaped the land.

4.       What do you do like to do when you aren’t working? I enjoy photography, reading about the early exploration of America, sea kayaking, biking, backpacking, white water rafting, cooking, eating Cajun foods, watching Blazer games and college football, and sampling microbrews.

5.       Where in the world would you like to travel next? For the longest time I’ve wanted to go to Africa and finally did so this year. For the next foreign trip, I’d like to go to Costa Rica and /or Peru. 

Mark Swank

1.       Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? I was born and raised in the South Bay Area (San Francisco Bay Area), and my wife and I moved to Portland about 10 years ago. The housing market was a little crazy in Silicon Valley in 2006, and we were looking for a place to locate that was affordable and fit our lifestyle. My wife worked for Intel so we looked for locations where we could both transfer with our jobs, which narrowed the possibilities to Scottsdale, Folsom, and Hillsboro – Hillsboro being the easy choice.

2.       What inspired you to pursue engineering geology? What made you curious about it?After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in Soil Science/Env. Management in 1999, my first job was working on a NavyCLEAN project with IT in the Central Valley on the closed Crows Landing Naval Air Base as an environmental scientist. I worked a lot with the lead geologist and what he was doing seemed far more interesting than what I was doing. I had always intended to get a Master’s degree in something – just wasn’t 100 percent what at the time I graduated. After my first engineering geology class in my Master’s program, I knew landslides and faults were for me. California has lots of regulations when it comes to faults that require a CEG stamp and I worked for a guy during my graduate studies that specialized in fault and geohazard studies for residential properties. Moving to Oregon put an end to the fault investigations, but landslides and the Northwest go together quite well.

3.       What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated? What I like best is that my work is something new all the time and no project is the same. I’ve always had a hard time explaining to people what I do for a living because it is so many different things, and I like that. I’m motivated and excited to always be learning something new. I would have left this field a long time ago if I had to do the same thing every day.

4.       What do you like to do when you aren’t working? I like to hang out with my family and vacation in warm, preferably tropical locations. For hobbies, I swim regularly, ski in the winter, play in a couple of soccer leagues, and hike.

5.       What five people would be your dream dinner party guests? Albert Einstein, Jon Stewart, Hemingway, Picasso, and Maria Theresa.

Announcing Aspect Portland

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Aspect Consulting is crossing the Columbia, opening up shop in downtown Portland.

Aspect Portland is a reality made possible by two extraordinary additions to our team: engineering geologists Pete Stroud and Mark Swank. Pete and Mark are both Portland locals, with decades of combined consulting experience between them. Our Portland team increases the breadth of technical talent available to our existing clients, as well as offering Oregon clients access to our 70+ person team of geotechnical, water resources, remediation engineers, hydrogeologists, and geologists.

 “Mark and I are excited to join Aspect and launch the Portland office. With Portland’s infrastructure market growing, many ongoing environmental cleanup projects throughout the region, and the challenge of managing limited water supply across the state, we really feel Aspect’s proven experience in those areas and deep roster of high-performing technical advisors is a great fit to help our Oregon clients succeed.” said Pete Stroud.

Pete Stroud

Pete joins Aspect as a Senior Associate Engineering Geologist, with over 30 years of professional experience leading engineering, engineering geologic, geotechnical, and environmental projects.

Mark Swank

Mark joins Aspect as a Senior Engineering Geologist with over 14 years of experience performing engineering and geologic analysis for schools, dams, and infrastructure projects. Mark and Pete were colleagues for over 10 years at Kleinfelder’s Portland office and bring their strong partnership to Aspect.

“This is a great time and a great team to bring Aspect’s extensive project experience to the greater Portland/Vancouver area and up the Columbia Gorge,” said Tim Flynn, President and Principal Hydrogeologist at Aspect. “Mark and Pete’s 40 years of combined consulting experience in the Portland area gives us immediate credibility with local clients and sets Aspect up for long-term success in the region.”

Highlights of their Portland and Pacific Northwest projects include the I-5 Willamette River Crossing in Eugene, Lake Oswego-Tigard Water Partnership (LOTWP) pipeline project, Condit Dam Decommissioning, Scoggins Dam Raise, Oregon Convention Center, Hoyt Street Properties Redevelopment and a tradition of working and managing a variety of on-call professional services contracts throughout the state.

Aspect’s new Portland office is located at 522 SW Fifth Avenue, Suite 1300, in the historic Yeon Building on the Portland Transit Mall in the heart of downtown. Keeping with Aspect’s commitment to sustainability, it’s a convenient, accessible location, close to our clients and teaming partners. 

Meet Ali Dennison

Aspect welcomes Ali Dennison, LG to our team! She is a Senior Project Geologist supporting residential, commercial, transportation, and industrial projects. Ali is currently working from our Seattle office and will be moving across the Sound to Bainbridge Island in the coming months. Here are five questions we asked to get to know her better:

Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? I was born in Breckenridge, Colorado, lived there for four years, then moved to New Jersey, which is where I consider I am “from.” However, I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for more than half my life now! I moved to Tacoma for college and convinced my mom to come with me and work for her brother in Seattle.

What inspired you to pursue geology? What made you curious about it? I started out in computer science, but quickly learned I was no good at it. I enjoyed the geology classes and love the field trips looking at rock outcrops and camping! I love the outdoors, so it just worked. I never really thought that I would have a career where I actually used my degree, but here I am 14 years later and still “playing with soil and rock.”

What do you like best about your area of expertise? What about your work excites you and keeps you motivated? I love being outside exploring project sites both above and below the ground. It is amazing what we can build. I enjoy sharing my experience and knowledge with junior staff so that they can grow. I enjoy being with people and helping clients solve challenges.

What do you do like to do when you aren’t working? You can find me swimming, biking, running, triathlon-ing, and skiing with my two kids, Cooper (5) and Ruby (3). I am currently training for Ironman Whistler on July 24 which includes a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike, ending with a 26.2-mile run. If you want to hear more about why: http://pages.teamintraining.org/wa/yourway16/adennison

Where in the world would you like to travel next?  I would love to take a safari in Africa, tour Italy, sail the Caribbean, and see Machu Picchu.

Meet Andrew Austreng

Aspect welcomes Andrew Austreng, LG to the team! Andrew joins our Seattle office as a Project Hydrogeologist with a wide range of experience in supporting water resources and water rights projects. Here are five questions we asked to get to know him better:

Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? My wife and I grew up in North Dakota. We came to the PNW because we felt like it has it all – great culture, beautiful landscape, and exciting professional opportunities. Needless to say, we have not been disappointed!

What inspired you to pursue hydrogeology? What made you curious about it? I grew up in a rural area surrounded by agriculture, where most people were served by private groundwater wells. I often found myself considering how the water needs of an entire household or community could be met by simply installing a pipe in the ground (I would later come to find out that it isn’t quite that simple). After my first introduction to geology, I understood the detective-like nature of hydrogeology, and knew that it would be a lifelong interest and satisfying career.

What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated? Focusing on water resources allows me to be part of something that often effects many people. It gives a unique perspective on preserving a valuable resource, while simultaneously serving the needs of individuals. There’s something very satisfying about getting someone the water they need for their home or business while knowing that you’ve done your best to preserve that same resource for others.

What do you do like to do when you aren’t working? Spending time with family! My wife and I have a newborn at home, and we enjoy spending a lot of time with our new family. That being said, I’ve also been known to squeeze in a few ski trips throughout the winter months, and I really enjoy honing my skills as a novice mechanic.

Where in the world would you like to travel next? Madagascar. I’d love to spend time exploring for plants and animals. There’s an area called the Forest of Knives that made my list – it’s a bizarre scene of limestone peaks filled with all sorts of birds and lemurs. On the other hand, with our newly expanded family we could happily settle for a week on a sandy beach!

Meet Eric Schellenger

Aspect welcomes Eric Schellenger to our Geotechnical/Infrastructure team. He started in March in our Seattle office and will be full time in June after he completes his master’s degree at the University of Washington. Here are five questions we asked to get to know him better:

Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here? I’m originally from Southern California. I moved to Portland after undergrad for work and fell in love with the beauty, vibe, and culture that I feel is so unique to the region. I lived there for about 3 years before moving to Seattle in September 2015 to pursue my master’s.

What inspired you to pursue geotechnical engineering? What made you curious about it? The site-specific nature of geotechnical engineering—the fact that no site is the same—triggered my interest.

What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated? The wide range of challenges and projects we get to face because of the site-specific nature mentioned above. Also, geotechnical engineering is less “by the book,” and geotechnical engineers get to exercise judgment more than any other kind of engineer.

What do you do like to do when you aren’t working? Exploring everything Seattle has to offer, manning the grill, walking/running Green Lake, hiking, reading, and taking road trips.

Where in the world would you like to visit next? Iceland and South Africa.

Eric in the Zebra Slot Canyon outside Escalante, Utah 

Encouraging Young Scientists

For the second year, Aspect’s Senior Remediation Engineer, Adam Griffin, spoke to the AP Environmental Science class at Franklin Pierce High school in Tacoma. Adam told the students about the variety of ways he applies science and engineering every day in his professional life and said, “I left energized and encouraged by the next generation’s awareness.” Many of these students have already been accepted into college and are pursuing science and engineering fields. Way to go Adam and best wishes to the Franklin Pierce students! 

Tim Flynn Spoke on Aquifer Storage and Recovery at the ASCE Seattle Meeting

Aspect's Tim Flynn was invited to speak about Aquifer Storage and Recovery at The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Seattle Section luncheon. Tim provided an overview of ASR, including objectives, applications, and regulatory permitting process, as well as several case studies.

Rebuilding Around the World: Henry Haselton’s Ongoing Volunteer Work

Principal Geotechnical Engineer Henry Haselton is providing pro bono engineering services to help rebuild and protect schools, villages, and farms affected by natural disasters in Nepal and Tanzania.

Henry has been working with All Hands Volunteers to rebuild schools that were destroyed after the massive earthquake in Nepal in April 2015. Most recently, he helped with site development and foundation recommendations for the East Point Academy in Melamchi, which is about 25 miles north of Katmandu. The Nepalese government prepared standard school designs, and they need engineering help to make the structures work at particular locations. He also designed an earthquake-resistant retaining wall to support the school in its new location. Henry is now embarking on work for another school project higher up in the Himalayas.

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photo courtesy of All Hands Volunteers

Earlier this year, Henry provided geotechnical consultation for a sugar cane producer who is affiliated with a non-governmental organization south of Moshi, Tanzania to help alleviate flooding of villages and farms in the area. The engineering work was led by master’s students from Tu Delft in the Netherlands. Henry’s work focused on extending levees and installing weirs to mitigate flooding, and included recommendations on geotechnical field and laboratory testing, slope stability analyses, and general geotechnical recommendations for the levees.

Too Much Flare, Not Enough Gas

Aspect’s Peter Bannister, along with King County’s Dan Swope, will co-present at the 2016 Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) Northwest Regional Symposium in Vancouver, BC on Friday April 8th.

As landfills age and landfill gas generation inevitably declines, landfill operators face the problem of using legacy collection and control systems that weren’t designed to harvest dwindling amounts of landfill gas. Simply continuing operation of these oversized systems is often not practical or financially prudent.

Peter and Dan will present the Enumclaw Landfill case-study and focus on how landfill gas forensics has proven to be an innovative solution to coaxing better performance out of existing landfill gas collection and control systems, and designing downscaled systems, at closed landfills in King County, Washington State.

Peter and Dan will present Friday morning at 10:30AM in technical session 6B – Advances in Landfill Gas Management.  Learn more about the conference HERE and view the agenda HERE.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Environmental Data Management Done Right: EQuIS in Action

Aspect’s Data + Mapping team uses time-saving tools to streamline our data analysis and processing to inform conclusions, design, and reporting—at the center of which is the environmental data management system EQuIS. Having long been leaders in the field of environmental chemistry data management, we have recently migrated from home-built, custom database systems to this industry standard. Our expertise with this powerful software has been bolstered by Senior Staff Data Scientist Lea Beard, who joined Aspect last summer. She is an EQuIS expert who turns her deep analytical chemistry and data management skills into efficiencies and insights for Aspects project teams and clients.

Why we use EQuIS:

• It is reliable and stable, ensuring the integrity of our clients’ valuable data.
• It helps us to process, review, manage, and analyze data as rapidly as our projects move.
• It enables us easily tailor reporting outputs to the nuanced needs of a project.
• It ensures adherence to standards and helps us to maintain consistency across projects.
• It safeguards our data’s compliance with environmental regulatory standards.

Created by EarthSoft, EQuIS is optimized to handle a broad-range of environmental data—particularly environmental chemistry data. EQuIS gives us the “brain” to formulate answers to the questions its users may ask, such as:

• How many fish passed through this culvert last year?
• To what extent have the concentrations of chlorinated solvents in groundwater responded to the remediation system operation?
• Was the Reporting Detection Limit for Lead low enough to meet the Quality Assurance Project Plan?
•  What were water level elevations in this monitoring well network from 2010 to 2015?

Having this framework already in place saves us and our clients time and money that would otherwise be spent building or customizing software to meet ever-changing needs. EQuIS also contains built-in solutions for common problems encountered in environmental reporting. It’s been put to the test by a wide cross-section of users—consultants, public agencies, corporations, laboratories—who have contributed their feedback and worked out bugs as they go. With a diverse group of users informing how it works for them, EQuIS is able to keep up with the state of environmental reporting.

Case Study in How EQuIS Simplifies Our Data Collection

Our staff heads out to a project site, tablet loaded with Fulcrum in hand, and begins to collect data. When the day is done, they send samples to the lab for analysis. Taking the field observations and measurements from Fulcrum and the analytical results from the lab, Lea feeds these two data sets alongside one another into EQuIS. With these normally separate datasets stored together in one spot, EQuIS makes it easy to access and search. Automated alerts and reporting based on preset parameters (perhaps a particular contaminant level has been detected or exceeded) means that project teams can make timely decisions about their next round of data collection or further investigation/inquiry. Reversing the direction of the data, Lea can then feed those results back into Fulcrum, sending it out to the team in the field, ensuring they have the most up-to-date information at the site. In the past this information exchange would have taken a week, but with EQuIS and Fulcrum, it takes mere hours.

EQuIS weaves together the data streams and creates meaningful output.

A Helping Hand Sets Clients on the Right Data Management Path

While EQuIS has the power and flexibility to make managing data easy, it can be a bit daunting to learn and implement. Lea helps guide clients through the set-up process – deciding on reference values, figuring out which lab electronic data deliverable formats to use, building reporting standards – forming the framework of their ongoing data management needs. From there, Aspect can help clients create software customizations to make summing groups of analytes (such as polychlorinated biphenyls) straightforward and reproducible, and offer assistance on making data easy to export into Ecology’s Environmental Information Management (EIM) database. Our in-house experience with EQuIS allows us to help clients tell their project’s story clearly.

Having someone like Lea at the helm of a program like EQuIS allows us to efficiently collect, manage, and report on data, ensuring that the rest of our team can focus on what they’re best at: science and strategic advice for our clients.

Meet Adam Griffin

Aspect is excited to welcome Adam Griffin to our Environmental team. He recently joined us as a Senior Remediation Engineer working from our Bainbridge Island office. Adam has 10 years of remediation experience across the country and internationally, supporting projects in Europe and South America. His experience is focused on the design and implementation of in-situ remediation approaches at commercial, industrial, and mining sites. Adam received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from the University of Tennessee and has worked in the Northwest for five years.

As part of his introduction to Aspect, Adam hosted a technical exchange for the staff. The presentation highlighted his broad experience with in-situ remediation technologies, or the cleanup of contaminated media in place as opposed to pumping or removal for aboveground treatment. Every site’s conditions are different, and therefore developing a sound Conceptual Site Model (CSM) allows the “tuning” of in-situ remediation technologies for successful implementation. Adam shared examples of unique site conditions, such as soil geochemistry, high-flux aquifers, and stratigraphic constraints, and then explored how to tailor an approach and design to allow successful implementation of the selected technologies. He walked us through five case studies spotlighting some of these methods that have led to successful site remediation.

When he’s not contemplating aquifer conditions or remediation geochemistry, Adam enjoys camping and kayaking around Western Washington, accompanied by his wife and their two dogs.

2015 - It's Been a Great Year!

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GIS Day Roundup

Aspect commemorated GIS Day, a part of Geography Awareness Week, with a spirited celebration featuring maps, trivia, and cake. 

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The festivities kicked off with a presentation by Senior Data Scientist Parker Wittman, highlighting some of the GIS team’s work over the last year. They have developed innovations using Fulcrum in concert with Google Earth, EQuIS, and other software to make field testing, sampling, and reporting much more efficient. Citing specific work Aspect has done for the Port of Seattle at SeaTac Airport, Parker demonstrated how the systems we’ve created are helping the Port assess the potential impacts proposed construction/redevelopment would have on the existing stormwater infrastructure and keep the existing mass of ever-updating data organized and easily accessible. Our team is strategically employing automated tools where it can save projects time and money.

Later in the day, we cut the cake as the GIS team set out to stump the rest of us with several rounds of GIS / geography-related trivia questions. 

• List the eight states and provinces that the entire Columbia River Basin lies within.
• What two countries provide full satellite coverage of the Pacific Northwest?
• If you live in this city in Washington State, you must cross through two international borders to drive your car to any major shopping areas.
• What is the comprehensive name of the interconnected seas, sounds, and bays in the Pacific Northwest?
• Bruce Springsteen's song "Streets of Philadelphia" won a Grammy and what other major award?

Of course, a GIS Day celebration would not be complete without an informative map. The GIS team polled staffers on all the places they’ve lived throughout their lives. Using the analytical software Tableau, they created this lovely lattice crisscrossing the world. 

Tim Flynn to Talk Water Right Strategies for Irrigators at the 2015 WSWRA Spokane Conference

Over December 2-4, the Washington State Water Resource Association’s (WSWRA) annual conference in Spokane will bring together experts and public policy leaders to discuss important 2016 water issues, including climate change, drought response, and many other relevant irrigation topics. Aspect’s president and principal hydrogeologist Tim Flynn will present on day one of the conference in the Irrigation District Workshop. His presentation on “Recent Case Studies of Effective Water Right Strategies to Support District Operations” will examine irrigation district’s potential risks and opportunities and highlight case studies of the White Salmon and Methow Valley Irrigation Districts. Learn more about the conference HERE.

New Geologic Map Unveils Port Ludlow's Underground

Aspect Staff Geologist Jesse Favia is a co-author of the recently published geologic map of the Port Ludlow area in Kitsap and Jefferson Counties. The map—officially the Geologic Map of the Port Ludlow and southern half of the Hansville 7.5-minute quadrangles, Kitsap and Jefferson Counties, Washington, Map Series 2015-02 by M. Polenz, J. G. Favia, I. J. Hubert, G. L. Paulin, and R. Cakir— was a joint effort between the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the United States Geological Survey. Much like a dictionary is an official reference point for language, geologic maps are the official references in the field of geology, and it is thought an honor to have a hand in creating one.

Jesse worked on the map through an internship with Michael Polenz at DNR. They started in July of 2014, when Jesse, Michael, and Ian Hubert set out to map the quadrangle, which covers Port Ludlow and about 50 square miles around it that includes parts of Kitsap and Jefferson County. The group spent the summer exploring the land—sometimes in a truck on rural roads, sometimes on foot through the forest, sometimes by boat floating by bluffs on the coastline. They looked for cut banks and slopes, any place where soils were exposed and allow them a peek below the ground surface. Some days were slow; some days they’d stumble upon a huge exposure where the layers of soil deposits were clearly visible and they could easily take samples to date and analyze.

When fall arrived, Jesse spent from November 2014 to May 2015 in Olympia conducting the “mini science experiment” that would ultimately make the map. They ran lab tests on the approximately 200 soil samples they collected, worked with DNR’s editing section to display the deposits, and wrote the corresponding report.

The result of their efforts created an updated geologic map that will be used by everyone from government agencies to local engineering firms to inform them about what’s underground around Port Ludlow. 

Click image below for full resolution.