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My LINK Internship blog about my adventures, experiences and forthcomings in Chicago, IL working for EGSL. The picture to the left was the view from my apartment overlooking the tallest building in the US and the gorgeous night skyline.
With my final day at EGSL, I spent the day recapping with my mentor and his/my boss about the work I did there, how I liked it and what I found really valuable. The people that I met and got to work with at EGSL were phenomenal, and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about any of my experiences interning there for 15 days. I felt that with the knowledge and the skills I gained here, living alone in Chicago and working every weekday, it was a fantastic experience I will never forget, and something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life as a very valuable learning opportunity. To all the people at EGSL, I cannot thank you enough for allowing me the privilege to work along side you and to learn how big a role environmental work plays in cleaning up the environment and cleaning up my hometown of Chicago.
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Today was another day on the site we pulled a diesel tank out of yesterday, but today we pulled out a much smaller tank from inside the garage. I got the chance to go inside (it was too dark for pictures and the flash made them really blown out) the building that housed these trucks and their workers, and most of the stuff inside hadn't been touched in a couple of decades and it was an extremely memorable experience going inside the building and seeing all these things that hadn't been moved since the 70's. All the old manifests were still inside, the desks were mostly cleaned out but little bits of history were everywhere and experiencing that part of the city was very memorable. Its always fascinated me how in large cities like Chicago, you drive past these little bits of hidden history that haven't been touched in decades and you have no idea what you might find! The sad part was, in the garage there had definitely been people going through there quite recently, throwing beer cans and trash into the corners and making a mess of the place. Below is where we pulled the tank out from the main truck bay inside the garage.
Today, after completing the maps and finishing the reports on this job, I got to finally go experience pulling a massive, swiss cheese looking cylinder out of the ground and helping oversee the work done. Below are some pictures of the tank being pulled out of the ground, and also inside the actual building where we will be pulling a really small tank from under the garage floor tomorrow.
With the tank pull job quickly approaching, I spent today working in the office again on the Auto CAD maps that will go on the report for this job. Each map takes a few hours at best, but these are especially challenging due to the geographical setup of the surrounding buildings and the location. Today was more specifically spent working on the map of the actual site and where any utility lines are, the actual tank and special details that wouldn't go on a radius map or a large scale map.
With the final week of LINK already here, I spent today brushing up on the site that we are going to be pulling a tank out of the ground and reading the history and the means as to how we are pulling it out. Jobs like these primarily require only our supervision and a construction team does most of the work, but since this tank is known to be leaking diesel fuel into the soil around it, we are required by the EPA to take soil samples to see if the soil needs any sort of further testing or removal done. Something that really stuck out and also something that I learned is that these buildings have been around since the 30's and 40's and its a really cool experience reading about how we as people have slowly started to realize that we are destroying our planet, and really making a mess of the resources we are given, and this definitely opened my eyes to how much id actually like it if I had a job like this, cleaning up our cities, even though its only one site at a time, its a step in the right direction and in my personal opinion its a noble cause id consider pursuing.
Today and the rest of this week were spent in the office working with Auto CAD and creating maps for the sites that I got to go out and do tests on. All the maps I drew up would go on the final EPA reports and on the report directly to the client who owned the property we were working on.
Today I got to witness one of (to date) the most disgusting and terrifying things i've seen in my life. I got the opportunity to visit and work on another site that was a currently still in use trucking repair garage, and the property manager was attempting to clean up the site so he could add onto the existing building. But the EPA required that they get the groundwater tested and the soil tested for oil and other contaminates. The wells had previously been installed and we were going back because today was the day that we got to bail out the wells, test the water and inject an agent to help stop the spreading of the oil, and clean up the ground water system. As you can see by the pictures, the garage was rather old, beat up and run down so we were expecting to find oil under the ground in the soil and the ground water, but not as bad as we soon discovered. Whats in the bucket is what we pulled straight from the ground water table, for the whole city. Yes, that is nearly straight oil and it smelled even worse than it looks, and this was the same for nearly all the wells in the garage. The scary fact about this was that there are many many more sites with this much contamination in the ground, and really opened my eyes to what we've done to our environment and the planet we live in. Despite the horrifying sight, I am really glad I got to work on this site because it gave me a really interesting experience and it was definitely eye opening. Below are the pictures mentioned as well as the site and inside the garage.
After last weeks -20 windchill, it actually warmed up a lot and my mentor and I were able to go out and sample the wells we had put in a few days ago. Since this was a demolition site and the buildings that were there were just distribution terminals for Dominick foods, we found no contamination at all in the water, and tested that via the PH levels and also logged a water sample to be sent to a lab. It didnt really suprise me that we didn't find anything today, and its definitely a good thing nothing was contaminated around the site. I learned a lot about how each site that they test is entirely different, and that there are many different ways to clean up different areas of the city. Below is a picture of one of the wells being installed, the machine pictured is called a GeoProbe which uses hydraulics and nitrous oxide to hammer, push, drill, pull and move soil, samples, wells and different kinds of drilling equipment. For all the outdoor sampling and in some cases indoor sampling of soil or ground water, the GeoProbe is always the machine they use.
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