GeoEngineers
Specialty: Earth sciences and technology consulting
Management: Jim Miller, CEO; Gordon Denby, COO; Dana Carlisle, principal and manager for Seattle, Redmond and Everett offices
Founded: 1980
Headquarters: Redmond
2005 revenues: $25 million
Projected 2006 revenues: $34 million
Current projects: Rainier Court, South Seattle; Valley Distribution Center, Auburn; Seattle Housing Authority property, 12th Avenue and East Yesler Way; Greenbridge project, White Center
Photo courtesy GeoEngineers GeoEngineers helped clean up an industrial site in South Seattle, which became the Rainier Court senior housing project. The project earned an EPA Phoenix Award for brownfield redevelopment.
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Brownfields are booming in Puget Sound, according to GeoEngineers principal Dana Carlisle.
“There’s a lot of urban infill going on,” she said. “The great majority of good sites for redevelopment are contaminated.”
GeoEngineers’ work in helping clean up old sites for redevelopment is flourishing as a result.
“One of the busiest years we have experienced,” according to Carlisle. The 26-year-old firm has 250 employees in 14 offices.
Award-winning project
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Carlisle said she’s proud of the firm’s role in developing the Rainier Court senior housing project on a severely contaminated site in South Seattle.
“It really looked like the badlands, drums spilled over, vacant buildings, scary for any developer,” she said. In November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the project its Phoenix Award, for the best project in the Northwest to rise from the ashes, so to speak, of a polluted site.
Fed law helps redevelopment
Carlisle said a 2002 federal brownfields law has helped spur the rapid pace of redevelopment. Until that law passed, property owners were liable for hazardous-waste cleanup costs regardless of fault. Now a purchaser can be exempt from liability, provided they do their homework.
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“If you conduct all appropriate inquiry, and find it’s contaminated, you won’t be held liable,” she said.
Carlisle would like to see Washington state follow suit with a law to allow diligent purchasers to be exempt from state cleanup liability.