June 27, 2005
Uncommon ground | Guerin Companies tackles the dangerous but essential work of hazardous site remediation
By Vanessa Cirulli
When Tyson Foods closed the Jordan's Meats plant on Feb. 1, one of the largest properties in Portland's booming East End neighborhood went up for sale. It didn't take long for developers to pounce: South Portland-based Liberty Companies bought the two-acre site that month and announced plans for a six-story, $100 million Westin Hotel and luxury condominium complex complete with high-end restaurants and retail space. Before Liberty could even begin demolition of the old plant, however, it had to deal with a nasty legacy of chemicals and environmental hazards left on Jordan's site.
The developer turned to Gorham-based Guerin Associates, which specializes in hazardous site cleanups. Called for a mercury spill at Jordan's Meats two years ago, Guerin Associates was familiar with the site. This time around, the company was hired to identify the waste, then pack assorted oils, antifreeze, refrigerator chemicals, and what founder and CEO Marianne Sensale-Guerin calls "mystery chemicals" into 20 55-gallon drums and special chemical transport containers for transfer to varying disposal facilities in the Northeast.
As more of Maine's former industrial sites become targets for redevelopment, situations like the cleanup at Jordan's Meats are increasingly common. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the United States produces more than 700,000 tons of hazardous waste every day, costing more than $1 billion a year to clean up ˆ figures that continue to escalate. But those grim statistics mean steady business for companies like Guerin Associates.
Since founding the company in 2001 with just four employees and a handful of government contracts, Marianne Sensale-Guerin has built a 20-person firm that specializes in environmental issues ranging from oil tank installation and removal to some of the larger hazardous cleanup sites in Maine. She's also branched out into two additional lines of business ˆ home heating oil delivery and property management ˆ under the umbrella of Guerin Companies, which in total generates more than $4 million in revenues annually.
That growth helped Sensale-Guerin win this year's U.S. Small Business Administration Small Business Person of the Year award for both the state and the entire country. "We grew so quickly," says Sensale-Guerin. "There's a lot of work out there. People don't realize it. There's always something new coming along."
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection shares Guerin's assessment. Although the total amount spent on site remediation in Maine is difficult to determine, says David Sait, director of the emergency response division at DEP's Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management, there are more than 5,000 registered underground oil storage tanks at approximately 3,000 underground oil storage facilities in Maine ˆ any one of which threatens to spring a leak at any time. And a 2005 document compiled by the DEP lists more than 300 petroleum-contaminated sites that require long-term remediation in Maine. That list isn't comprehensive, according to Sait, but compiled only from the sites that have come to the state's attention.
Contaminated sites come to the state's attention for a variety of reasons, says Sait, but property transfer like the sale of the Jordan's Meats plant is usually the culprit. Abandoned hazardous industrial sites take up acres of land that, unless decontaminated, are both dangerous and unfit for any future use. The site remediation process cleans these areas ˆ commonly known as brownfields ˆ so that the land is once again safe and valuable to municipalities and private developers.
Once a site is identified and targeted for cleanup, the state typically hires an environmental engineering firm to determine, through further testing and evaluation, how to recover the contaminated soil, who will do the recovering and where to take it for treatment. Companies like Guerin Associates then do the dirty work of implementing those cleanups, which vary in complexity from a leaky home heating oil tank to entire communities suffering from contaminated groundwater and overstressed aquifers (see "Handle with care," p. 27).
In all, the BRWM responds to more than 2,500 site contamination calls a year, says David Maxwell, its assistant director ˆ and the number of events continues to increase by 100-200 calls annually, he says. "There's not really an end in sight for what's left in terms of cleanup," says Maxwell.
Despite what seems like favorable market conditions for Guerin Associates, Sensale-Guerin can't rely on endless demand to keep her company afloat. The field is crowded with competitors ranging from local companies no bigger than her own to environmental cleanup corporations like Clean Harbors ˆ a Fortune 500 company with more than 100 locations in North America and its own landfills, incineration facilities and wastewater treatment centers.
Starting from scratch
Sensale-Guerin's career in environmental cleanup began in the mid-80s, when she was working for an oil company that owned a number of gas stations in Maine. At the time, evolving underground storage tank regulations required the company to remove, inspect and reinstall many of its tanks. The unforeseen expense was such a blow that it was partially responsible for putting the company out of business, says Sensale-Guerin.
Fascinated by the new awareness of pollution control issues, as well as the physical challenges and technological advancements in cleaning up hazardous messes, Guerin took a job with Clean Harbors in 1989, where she met her husband, Marc. The couple left Clean Harbors to join South Portland-based Consolidated Environmental Services, which was bought by Texas-based Waste Management Inc. in 1991. So that year, Sensale-Guerin and her husband formed Pollution Control Services in Gorham, which cleaned up hazardous waste sites for private and governmental clients.
In 1999, the couple sold Pollution Control Services to Ballston Spa, N.Y.-based North American Environmental, which performed industrial cleaning and pipeline maintenance from 10 locations in the United States and Canada. Although she and her husband both took jobs with the company, Sensale-Guerin moved to its New York offices while her husband remained in Maine, where, barely a year later, he was killed in a work-related accident. Sensale-Guerin returned to Maine so that her son, then 14, wouldn't be uprooted after the death of his father. But within the year, North American Environmental announced it was closing its Maine division.
Unwilling to move again, Sensale-Guerin made the company a deal: In exchange for three federal contracts for the inspection and maintenance of the fuel and sewage storage facilities at Brunswick Naval Air Station, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, Guerin would let the company out of her employment contract.
At the time, says Sensale-Guerin, North American Environmental was attempting to diversify into environmental services. But having never dealt with hazardous material ˆ which was Sensale-Guerin's expertise ˆ the company didn't know how to handle fuel tank maintenance contracts. "I knew they had to execute the contracts," says Sensale-Guerin. "So they gave me the three and I had to start from scratch."
Not two months after her husband's death, Sensale-Guerin was at the bank with a business plan. Within two weeks, with her husband's life insurance to bankroll her payroll and a $100,000 loan, Guerin Associates was up and running with four employees. Guerin Associates got another boost later that year, when it won a $900,000 soil remediation contract for the Defense Energy Support Center site in Searsport. The site cleanup was engineered by Portland-based GZA GeoEnvironmental Inc., one of 20 environmental engineering companies qualified by DEP to handle contaminated-site cleanup engineering, which in turn hired Guerin Associates to perform the site work.
That plan called for the nearly two miles of on-site pipeline and valves to be cleaned, and more than 60,000 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil to be hauled to the Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden. The project kept her crew busy for nearly eight months. "I was very fortunate," says Sensale-Guerin.
But Tom Lawless, associate principal and district office manager for GZA GeoEnvironmental, says it's not just luck that got Guerin Associates the contract. Sensale-Guerin's reputation in the industry gave her fledgling company clout. In the remediation industry, the more experience a company has in the field, the more valuable it becomes, says Lawless.
Now, having worked with Guerin Associates for more than 10 years, Lawless says he's seen how Sensale-Guerin and her employees often come to the table with ideas on how do a job quicker and cheaper. In 2003, for example, Guerin Associates removed heavily contaminated soil from four Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Co. facilities, which operated state-approved sites for waste oil collection between 1969 and 1978. One site, in Ellsworth, was surrounded by an uncontaminated wooded area that made maneuvering the excavation equipment tricky, says Lawless. "We really depended on [Guerin] to sequence where and how we were going to start digging and where to pile soil," he says. "She's a straight shooter. If she can do it, she'll tell you. If she can't, she'll tell you that, too."
That reputation continues to an important asset, because the majority of Guerin Associates' jobs are state and federally funded cleanup efforts for which the company is too small to be the sole contractor. Besides such large-scale cleanups, about a quarter of Guerin Associates' business is emergency oil spill response for events such as underground storage tank leaks or truck rollovers, says Sensale-Guerin. These jobs require that a cleanup crew be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which sometimes means that workers are pulled from a remediation job in the event of an emergency.
"All the contractors know that we're first an emergency responder," says Sensale-Guerin, but she notes that the emergency schedule is carefully coordinated to avoid taking too many crew members from a job at once. Between the contracted site remediation and emergency calls, Guerin Associates handles more than 100 jobs annually.
Brownfields to green lawns
More often than not, the sites targeted for cleanup and remediation are old facilities, says Sensale-Guerin, lingering problems from a time when there were little or no environmental regulations. But even with today's stricter rules, the remediation business isn't about to disappear, she says. "Every time we think we're getting to a point where there's nothing else, something else comes along," she says.
Several years ago, mercury cleanup became one of the industry's biggest issues, with the 2000 cleanup of the HoltraChem site in Orrington, the discovery of school science lab stockpiles across the state and leaks in Waterville. Still, mercury cleanups have only amounted to about three percent of Guerin Associates' jobs. A bigger threat ˆ and bigger market ˆ Sensale-Guerin sees coming is mold remediation. Although mold is not yet regulated the way petroleum or chlorinated chemicals are, its health impacts have been proven, she says. Her company is preparing to work with regulations when and if they come into effect. "We're already certified" to perform mold remediation, she says, having completed programs by the National Association of Mold Professionals and Schatz Mold Professionals to analyze mold problems, eliminate the mold itself and fix the water issues that caused it in the first place.
Sensale-Guerin also has worked from the beginning to safeguard her company against the unpredictability of the future by looking for complementary businesses. In 2001, for example, she looked at the tanker trucks she already owned for hauling liquid waste away from contaminated sites and saw a way to keep her crew busy during the slow winter months, when the frozen ground makes site work impossible in Maine. That year, she created Guerin Oil, a heating oil delivery service, which has grown to 4,000 customers in 2005 and generates 30% of Guerin Companies' revenues.
Three years later, with the company outgrowing a small office in central Gorham, Guerin moved to a spacious property outside of town. The new space was so large, however, that Sensale-Guerin needed to find additional tenants to help pay the lease. The solution was Guerin Properties, which not only manages the leased space in her own building, but offers snow plowing and lawn care to her oil customers and complete landscaping capabilities for her brownfield and remediation site contracts.
Sensale-Guerin's next move is geographical expansion, she says. The company opened its second location in Presque Isle in late 2002, and Sensale-Guerin says she'd like to have an office in central Maine and another in Portsmouth, N.H. But expanding is not without its challenges ˆ the biggest one is finding employees, according to Guerin.
Because soil decontamination is such a specialized field, employee training and safety certification is one of the company's biggest personnel expenses. Guerin Associates pays for each employee's 40-hour Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response Standard federal training, yearly eight-hour refresher courses, CPR, first aid and confined space certifications totaling nearly $2,000 per employee. "I can't really go out and get subcontract labor because you can't just put anybody on a hazardous site," she says. "I'm kind of caught," she admits.
Assuming Guerin can solve her skilled labor issues, though, the industry offers growth opportunities for companies that can evolve along with ever-changing environmental regulations and remediation technologies. Those technologies and techniques have come a long way in the past 30 years, says David Sait of DEP. But no matter how good companies get at handling contaminated soil, the jobs are expected to keep coming. "[The work of environmental cleanup] will never get done, because we live and therefore we make messes," says Sait. "That's just a fact of life."
The developer turned to Gorham-based Guerin Associates, which specializes in hazardous site cleanups. Called for a mercury spill at Jordan's Meats two years ago, Guerin Associates was familiar with the site. This time around, the company was hired to identify the waste, then pack assorted oils, antifreeze, refrigerator chemicals, and what founder and CEO Marianne Sensale-Guerin calls "mystery chemicals" into 20 55-gallon drums and special chemical transport containers for transfer to varying disposal facilities in the Northeast.
As more of Maine's former industrial sites become targets for redevelopment, situations like the cleanup at Jordan's Meats are increasingly common. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the United States produces more than 700,000 tons of hazardous waste every day, costing more than $1 billion a year to clean up ˆ figures that continue to escalate. But those grim statistics mean steady business for companies like Guerin Associates.
Since founding the company in 2001 with just four employees and a handful of government contracts, Marianne Sensale-Guerin has built a 20-person firm that specializes in environmental issues ranging from oil tank installation and removal to some of the larger hazardous cleanup sites in Maine. She's also branched out into two additional lines of business ˆ home heating oil delivery and property management ˆ under the umbrella of Guerin Companies, which in total generates more than $4 million in revenues annually.
That growth helped Sensale-Guerin win this year's U.S. Small Business Administration Small Business Person of the Year award for both the state and the entire country. "We grew so quickly," says Sensale-Guerin. "There's a lot of work out there. People don't realize it. There's always something new coming along."
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection shares Guerin's assessment. Although the total amount spent on site remediation in Maine is difficult to determine, says David Sait, director of the emergency response division at DEP's Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management, there are more than 5,000 registered underground oil storage tanks at approximately 3,000 underground oil storage facilities in Maine ˆ any one of which threatens to spring a leak at any time. And a 2005 document compiled by the DEP lists more than 300 petroleum-contaminated sites that require long-term remediation in Maine. That list isn't comprehensive, according to Sait, but compiled only from the sites that have come to the state's attention.
Contaminated sites come to the state's attention for a variety of reasons, says Sait, but property transfer like the sale of the Jordan's Meats plant is usually the culprit. Abandoned hazardous industrial sites take up acres of land that, unless decontaminated, are both dangerous and unfit for any future use. The site remediation process cleans these areas ˆ commonly known as brownfields ˆ so that the land is once again safe and valuable to municipalities and private developers.
Once a site is identified and targeted for cleanup, the state typically hires an environmental engineering firm to determine, through further testing and evaluation, how to recover the contaminated soil, who will do the recovering and where to take it for treatment. Companies like Guerin Associates then do the dirty work of implementing those cleanups, which vary in complexity from a leaky home heating oil tank to entire communities suffering from contaminated groundwater and overstressed aquifers (see "Handle with care," p. 27).
In all, the BRWM responds to more than 2,500 site contamination calls a year, says David Maxwell, its assistant director ˆ and the number of events continues to increase by 100-200 calls annually, he says. "There's not really an end in sight for what's left in terms of cleanup," says Maxwell.
Despite what seems like favorable market conditions for Guerin Associates, Sensale-Guerin can't rely on endless demand to keep her company afloat. The field is crowded with competitors ranging from local companies no bigger than her own to environmental cleanup corporations like Clean Harbors ˆ a Fortune 500 company with more than 100 locations in North America and its own landfills, incineration facilities and wastewater treatment centers.
Starting from scratch
Sensale-Guerin's career in environmental cleanup began in the mid-80s, when she was working for an oil company that owned a number of gas stations in Maine. At the time, evolving underground storage tank regulations required the company to remove, inspect and reinstall many of its tanks. The unforeseen expense was such a blow that it was partially responsible for putting the company out of business, says Sensale-Guerin.
Fascinated by the new awareness of pollution control issues, as well as the physical challenges and technological advancements in cleaning up hazardous messes, Guerin took a job with Clean Harbors in 1989, where she met her husband, Marc. The couple left Clean Harbors to join South Portland-based Consolidated Environmental Services, which was bought by Texas-based Waste Management Inc. in 1991. So that year, Sensale-Guerin and her husband formed Pollution Control Services in Gorham, which cleaned up hazardous waste sites for private and governmental clients.
In 1999, the couple sold Pollution Control Services to Ballston Spa, N.Y.-based North American Environmental, which performed industrial cleaning and pipeline maintenance from 10 locations in the United States and Canada. Although she and her husband both took jobs with the company, Sensale-Guerin moved to its New York offices while her husband remained in Maine, where, barely a year later, he was killed in a work-related accident. Sensale-Guerin returned to Maine so that her son, then 14, wouldn't be uprooted after the death of his father. But within the year, North American Environmental announced it was closing its Maine division.
Unwilling to move again, Sensale-Guerin made the company a deal: In exchange for three federal contracts for the inspection and maintenance of the fuel and sewage storage facilities at Brunswick Naval Air Station, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, Guerin would let the company out of her employment contract.
At the time, says Sensale-Guerin, North American Environmental was attempting to diversify into environmental services. But having never dealt with hazardous material ˆ which was Sensale-Guerin's expertise ˆ the company didn't know how to handle fuel tank maintenance contracts. "I knew they had to execute the contracts," says Sensale-Guerin. "So they gave me the three and I had to start from scratch."
Not two months after her husband's death, Sensale-Guerin was at the bank with a business plan. Within two weeks, with her husband's life insurance to bankroll her payroll and a $100,000 loan, Guerin Associates was up and running with four employees. Guerin Associates got another boost later that year, when it won a $900,000 soil remediation contract for the Defense Energy Support Center site in Searsport. The site cleanup was engineered by Portland-based GZA GeoEnvironmental Inc., one of 20 environmental engineering companies qualified by DEP to handle contaminated-site cleanup engineering, which in turn hired Guerin Associates to perform the site work.
That plan called for the nearly two miles of on-site pipeline and valves to be cleaned, and more than 60,000 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil to be hauled to the Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden. The project kept her crew busy for nearly eight months. "I was very fortunate," says Sensale-Guerin.
But Tom Lawless, associate principal and district office manager for GZA GeoEnvironmental, says it's not just luck that got Guerin Associates the contract. Sensale-Guerin's reputation in the industry gave her fledgling company clout. In the remediation industry, the more experience a company has in the field, the more valuable it becomes, says Lawless.
Now, having worked with Guerin Associates for more than 10 years, Lawless says he's seen how Sensale-Guerin and her employees often come to the table with ideas on how do a job quicker and cheaper. In 2003, for example, Guerin Associates removed heavily contaminated soil from four Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Co. facilities, which operated state-approved sites for waste oil collection between 1969 and 1978. One site, in Ellsworth, was surrounded by an uncontaminated wooded area that made maneuvering the excavation equipment tricky, says Lawless. "We really depended on [Guerin] to sequence where and how we were going to start digging and where to pile soil," he says. "She's a straight shooter. If she can do it, she'll tell you. If she can't, she'll tell you that, too."
That reputation continues to an important asset, because the majority of Guerin Associates' jobs are state and federally funded cleanup efforts for which the company is too small to be the sole contractor. Besides such large-scale cleanups, about a quarter of Guerin Associates' business is emergency oil spill response for events such as underground storage tank leaks or truck rollovers, says Sensale-Guerin. These jobs require that a cleanup crew be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which sometimes means that workers are pulled from a remediation job in the event of an emergency.
"All the contractors know that we're first an emergency responder," says Sensale-Guerin, but she notes that the emergency schedule is carefully coordinated to avoid taking too many crew members from a job at once. Between the contracted site remediation and emergency calls, Guerin Associates handles more than 100 jobs annually.
Brownfields to green lawns
More often than not, the sites targeted for cleanup and remediation are old facilities, says Sensale-Guerin, lingering problems from a time when there were little or no environmental regulations. But even with today's stricter rules, the remediation business isn't about to disappear, she says. "Every time we think we're getting to a point where there's nothing else, something else comes along," she says.
Several years ago, mercury cleanup became one of the industry's biggest issues, with the 2000 cleanup of the HoltraChem site in Orrington, the discovery of school science lab stockpiles across the state and leaks in Waterville. Still, mercury cleanups have only amounted to about three percent of Guerin Associates' jobs. A bigger threat ˆ and bigger market ˆ Sensale-Guerin sees coming is mold remediation. Although mold is not yet regulated the way petroleum or chlorinated chemicals are, its health impacts have been proven, she says. Her company is preparing to work with regulations when and if they come into effect. "We're already certified" to perform mold remediation, she says, having completed programs by the National Association of Mold Professionals and Schatz Mold Professionals to analyze mold problems, eliminate the mold itself and fix the water issues that caused it in the first place.
Sensale-Guerin also has worked from the beginning to safeguard her company against the unpredictability of the future by looking for complementary businesses. In 2001, for example, she looked at the tanker trucks she already owned for hauling liquid waste away from contaminated sites and saw a way to keep her crew busy during the slow winter months, when the frozen ground makes site work impossible in Maine. That year, she created Guerin Oil, a heating oil delivery service, which has grown to 4,000 customers in 2005 and generates 30% of Guerin Companies' revenues.
Three years later, with the company outgrowing a small office in central Gorham, Guerin moved to a spacious property outside of town. The new space was so large, however, that Sensale-Guerin needed to find additional tenants to help pay the lease. The solution was Guerin Properties, which not only manages the leased space in her own building, but offers snow plowing and lawn care to her oil customers and complete landscaping capabilities for her brownfield and remediation site contracts.
Sensale-Guerin's next move is geographical expansion, she says. The company opened its second location in Presque Isle in late 2002, and Sensale-Guerin says she'd like to have an office in central Maine and another in Portsmouth, N.H. But expanding is not without its challenges ˆ the biggest one is finding employees, according to Guerin.
Because soil decontamination is such a specialized field, employee training and safety certification is one of the company's biggest personnel expenses. Guerin Associates pays for each employee's 40-hour Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response Standard federal training, yearly eight-hour refresher courses, CPR, first aid and confined space certifications totaling nearly $2,000 per employee. "I can't really go out and get subcontract labor because you can't just put anybody on a hazardous site," she says. "I'm kind of caught," she admits.
Assuming Guerin can solve her skilled labor issues, though, the industry offers growth opportunities for companies that can evolve along with ever-changing environmental regulations and remediation technologies. Those technologies and techniques have come a long way in the past 30 years, says David Sait of DEP. But no matter how good companies get at handling contaminated soil, the jobs are expected to keep coming. "[The work of environmental cleanup] will never get done, because we live and therefore we make messes," says Sait. "That's just a fact of life."
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