Environmental Program Manager, US Air Force

>> My name is William Burress [phonetic], people call me Bill and I am an environmental program manager for the United States Air Force, specifically for the United States Air Force Civil Engineer Center in the installation support team. At Air Force bases the vast majority of contamination that are dealt with under the environmental restoration program are mostly petroleum products, fuels, aviation fuel, lubricants, oils, solvents, and those are the two primary sources of contamination that impact the soil and the groundwater. If we believe that there's contamination in place the first goal is to actually screen for contamination. Conduct some form of investigation to see if there is contamination present. In other words, is it actually there is the first step. There's a formal process on how environmental investigations are done, this process is managed under what we call the National Contingency Plan, which is built into the Code of Federal Regulations on how we conduct environmental work. And this program or the National Contingency Plan is kind of put in place by the EPA way back in the early 1980's and we all follow this protocol across the federal government on how we actually find, identify, investigate and address clean up, remediate environmental contamination. So that first step is to just determine whether or not contamination is actually present. Our role at my organization is to facilitate that investigation, so we do the contracting, we hire the teams, the contractor teams to conduct that investigation, and then we interface between that team and the base to make sure that they can do their work without impacting or adversely messing up the mission at the base or the installation. And we also deal with the regulators in terms of reporting the results, our plans and how we need to proceed. That's sort of our interaction with the regulators that is managed by the installation support services.