Local Connections
Dean Carter comes home to Maine to lead Orrington Remediation Project
After spending the majority of his career away, Dean Carter has come home to Maine where the 56-year-old engineer was born and raised and graduated from the University of Maine with his degree in civil engineering. Dean returned to assume the role of Construction Manager for the final environmental remediation of the former HoltraChem site.
Dean’s work for CDM Smith, a global engineering and construction company based in Cambridge, MA, began in 2001 when he worked on a landfill reclamation project alongside CDM Smith engineers and ended up joining the company. Over the course of his career, Dean worked in Southern Maine in construction before moving to Georgia where he focused his engineering work on environmental remediation, and finally moved to Florida – far away from the New England winters.
Dean has more than 25 years of experience working on environmental remediation projects all over the country. Dean and his colleagues in Orrington bring a wealth knowledge and more sophisticated techniques to the task of excavating thousands of tons of soil from sites without exposing the air or water to contamination. This extensive experience is very valuable at the Orrington site because they use the same construction techniques, the same health and safety measures and air monitoring that they have developed over many years.
Jessica Munson: A local engineer returns home to Orrington
Working as a Construction Specialist with CDM Smith couldn't be more convenient for Jessica Munson. “It’s great,” says the Orrington native. “I’m about two miles from the site and I feel like I am doing something important here helping out the town.”
After graduating from high school, Jessica left for Norwich University in Vermont, graduating in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science degree in construction engineering management. She had worked locally at W.S. Emerson Co. in Brewer tracking over 1,000 customer accounts and performing billing and accounting services. Following her graduation from Norwich, she remained at the campus working for the university construction services as an administrator on four multi-million dollar construction projects.
Her eye for detail and her organization skills were not lost on Dean Carter, the Construction Manager at the site for CDM Smith. “Accurate documentation of everything that happens on this site is critical to our success here, and she has that ability to not only track what is going on here on a daily basis but also to analyze it from a quality control perspective, ” says Dean. “Jessica will be monitoring our compliance and making sure that we have all our permits in place so we can keep this project moving on schedule.”
And for Jessica it is a chance to not only return to her roots, but to build her knowledge base on a project that will remediate a site in her hometown, where her family and friends are.
Decades of experience has well prepared John Sevee to work on the Orrington site
John Sevee has been part of the environmental remediation business since the early 1980s, when no one really understood the best approach to clean up contaminated sites. In the past thirty years, engineering companies have learned a lot about where contaminations come from, how contamination moves in the environment and how to deal with such problems.
When Sevee and Maher started out in 1985, Peter Maher specialized in landfill design and John focused on groundwater contamination transport and remediation. Sevee and Maher has grown considerably over the years into clean water source supply and commercial spring development, civil engineering and permitting, waste water treatment, and compliance monitoring.
Sevee and Maher has investigated hydrogeology on many sites here in Maine and their engineers have remediated sites all over the country and are familiar with the behavior of various chemicals and remediation approaches for specific chemicals. Their work on mercury sites in the past gives Sevee and Maher engineers directly applicable understanding into the behavior of the mercury mobility on the Orrington site.