Environmental Division Manager: Karl Yost
Specialty: Site remediation, environmental restoration
Estimated yearly revenues: $30 million
Largest current project: Construction of a cell to contain sediments for future dredging at the Port of Olympia, cleanup at the site of Sound Transit's Everett Station.
The industry of environmental remediation has been going through some restructuring, according to Karl Yost, manager of Wilder Construction's Environmental Division.
"It's been kind of slow over the last year or so," Yost says. "There's been a lot of consolidation, especially with the some of the big contractors ... traditional environmental design people are starting to do different design work."
Yost attributes the slow market to the lack of renewed Superfund legislation by Congress. "For the past few years, there's been no Superfund in place," he says. "Work is very competitive."
Revenues for Wilder Construction are about $150 million a year, and about 20 percent of that comes from Wilder Environmental. The environmental staff varies as people are traded between divisions depending on the size of the project. Staff size can be as large as 100 people.
Currently, Yost says the market seems to be driven by development. "An existing site will be cleaned up and developed for reuse," he says. For example, Wilder is working on a city of Everett job to clean up a site for construction of the new Everett Station. "We're in the middle of finishing up demolition and removal of an old fuel distributor system and contaminated soil removal."
Wilder is also getting ready to construct a cell to contain dredging materials at the Port of Olympia. Yost says many of the firm's recent projects have involved dredge work as well as landfill construction and closures.
"It has to do with population growth in the area," he says. "More people means more refuse. It puts quite a bit of pressure on landfills."