Meet Hanna Winter and Alec Melone

Aspect recently welcomed Hanna Winter to our Bellingham office and Alec Melone to our Seattle office. Here are Five Questions we asked to get to know them better.

Hanna Winter, Project Environmental Data Scientist

Hanna and son on the Oregon coast in Seaside.

1. Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here?

I was born in Finland and grew up in Bellevue. I’ve been in Bellingham pretty much since moving here to attend Western Washington University.

2. What inspired you to pursue Environmental (Data) Science? What made you curious about it?

As a kid, I was an avid recycler and organizer of litter-cleanups. I dreamed of being a scientist who helped solve environmental challenges. Now, I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in environmental science and have worked in water quality, wetlands, NEPA, soil carbon cycling, and sustainable agriculture. So I’ve covered a lot of topics!

My favorite part of each of these specialties was working with the data: analysis, visualization, and reporting. I’m a stickler for details and am always striving to learn new skills. That’s what inspired me to join Aspect’s Data Team.

3. What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated?

I enjoy nothing more than working with data to answer questions, tease out trends, and find the best way to present the results. I love working in R – especially for data wrangling, data visualization, and automating routine analysis tasks. I’m passionate about streamlining workflows, ensuring process transparency, and providing clear documentation, reporting, and communication.

Since I’m just starting on my environmental data science adventure with Aspect, I’m excited about the variety of work and projects, continuing to learn and grow my data management and analysis skills, and working in a team to solve complex data puzzles.

4. What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

Gardening and yard projects, cooking and preserving, hanging out with family and friends, taking walks, reading, watching movies, and camping or just having a campfire in the yard.

5. Where would your dream house be located?

In Bellingham with a secret 5-acre yard in the back, a sauna, and a portal in a closet so I can get to Finland quickly. Of course, I would also have an apartment in Helsinki to house the other end of the portal.

Alec Melone, Staff Geologist, GIT

Alec at Tuck Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Note the geologically appropriate shirt - ‘Wait, I See a Rock’

1. Where are you from? If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, what brought you here?

I grew up in Farmington, Connecticut where I went to Hamilton College thinking to study biology or history and took an introductory geology class to gain a better understanding of the rocks I’d been collecting as a hobby since childhood. After the intro course succeeded in hooking me and I’d finished my degree, I went to Central Washington University in Ellensburg to continue studying igneous petrology in a master’s program.

2. What inspired you to pursue engineering geology? What made you curious about it?

I fell in love with geology for the greater understanding of the world around me that could be gained and working in the geotechnical field allows me to better understand that natural and man-made world. With Aspect, I get to do field explorations where I am discovering the geology of places that may never have been studied in detail, as well as seeing everything that sits below the roads and buildings around us.

3. What do you like best about your area of expertise? What excites you and keeps you motivated?

It’s always satisfying to me to visit a site at the end of a project and think back to how it looked at the start, to compare the before and after and see the improvement. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment, and it’s good to know that the work I do gives clients peace of mind going forward.

4. What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

I love reading/listening to audiobooks, hiking in the woods, and playing board games with friends! Always looking for new book/game recommendations or cool places to check out! Also love trivia competitions and would love to talk your ears off about Tolkien lore!

5. Where in the world would you like to travel next?

I’d love to go to Italy someday to see the old Roman ruins, visit Pompeii, see Vesuvius and Etna. I’d also love to see the southwest US and hike the Grand Canyon, visit Petrified Wood National Park.

Data Teams as Gatekeepers to Unlock Brownfield Cleanups

Environmental data teams methodically confirm cleanup levels and visualize the 'cleanup finish line' with the regulatory criteria and client end goals

What is the measure of ‘clean’ at brownfield sites? Before any digging of contaminated dirt or treatment of contaminated groundwater, there is much upfront work by regulators and project teams – chemists, data analysts, geologists, engineers, and more – to determine the appropriate cleanup levels to use for a given site. The cleanup levels are the north star that every brownfield cleanup team steers by.

To Succeed, Be Sure What ‘Clean’ Looks Like

Aspect’s environmental data team regularly keeps the finger on the pulse of regulatory databases and uses tools – such as the open-source programming language R – to streamline brownfield cleanup projects.

Using R to automate screening level updates allows project teams to:

• Make changes quickly and confidently

• Minimize the risk of errors and omissions

• Provide much-improved process transparency

• Streamline communications across the project team

Keeping up on the best available science gives project managers greater assurance that their sites are being appropriately measured against regulatory criteria, providing a smoother path forward in the management and remediation of contaminated sites.

A Peek into Regulatory Data World with CLARC

CLARC is the Washington State Department of Ecology’s (Ecology) Cleanup Levels and Risk Calculation spreadsheet that is the basis for calculating cleanup levels under Ecology’s Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA). MTCA is Washington state’s cleanup rule which governs over 13,000+ known or suspected contaminated sites. CLARC is a key measure of what defines success at these cleanup projects and a living document that is maintained and updated by Ecology, as needed, with major updates every six months to align with changes to state and federal regulatory (e.g., US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)) criteria.

Aspect engineer evaluating a vapor intrusion system at Art Brass Plating – a South Seattle cleanup site. The measure of success for these systems — and projects — rely on knowing the correct and up-to-date cleanup level criteria

The data tables in CLARC provide the various input parameters used to calculate screening levels for a huge array of chemicals in soil, groundwater, surface water, soil gas, and air—as well as the resulting calculated cleanup level values themselves. The calculated values are routinely used by remediation project managers to screen analytical results (from samples collected in the field) against federal, state, or other regulatory thresholds.

What is R and How Does it Accurately Automate Away Manual Data Entry?

R is an open-source software environment used for statistical computing and graphics. Recently, Aspect’s data team wrote a package of R code to use CLARC’s input parameters to calculate a suite of specific screening levels. The same code can be run any time the input values in CLARC are updated, generating quality assurance tables to alert Aspect’s data team of potential issues, and providing summary tables for Aspect project managers to review cleanup level changes and consider their potential impact to their various environmental sites.

Various input parameters, including regulatory requirements, chemistry, site use, human safety and environmental quality are entered into our custom R tool to make and maintain a reliable, reproducible metric set for project success

Since there are usually screening levels for hundreds of different analytes at remediation cleanups  – e.g., petroleum and diesel, arsenic, tetrachloroethylene and more – when the CLARC database is updated by the regulator, it can be difficult to see if there have been any changes and which analytes may have been affected.

Aspect uses the industry standard EQuiS environmental data management system. The R tool helps us better use EQuIS to manage and screen environmental data against cleanup levels. Before using R, preparing CLARC-based screening and cleanup levels for upload to EQuIS required tedious data wrangling in Excel and institutional knowledge of what analytes should be compared to which screening levels. With R, the process involves little more than a click of a button

Data Problem Solving that Makes Remediation Easier

R simplifying the complexity of the brownfield cleanup level process

Brownfield remediation cleanups require imagining a range of scenarios for the future use of a ‘clean’ property. Will the site be used for residential, commercial, or industrial purposes? What pollutants are present and where? It all starts with the cleanup level criteria.

Overall, this work by Aspect’s data team – who are meticulous at knowing the state-of-the-science regulatory criteria – ensures Aspect’s project teams have the correct screening or cleanup levels based on the most current toxicity guidance, which helps avoid rework later on in the process and saves time and money for the client.