Herrera Environmental Consultants
Specialty: Civil and environmental engineering, environmental science and planning
Management: Carlos Herrera, president; Michael Spillane and Carol Slaughterbeck, vice presidents
Founded: 1980
Headquarters: Seattle
2006 revenues: $12 million
Projected 2007 revenues: $14 million
Current projects: Mashel River restoration; Georgetown Flume demolition and contaminated sediment cleanup
Image courtesy of Herrera Environmental Consultants Herrera Environmental Consultants is providing hazardous materials cleanup and civil engineering for the removal of the historic Georgetown Flume in Seattle. |
Herrera Environmental Consultants is doing a project for the South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group on the Mashel River. It involves the design and hydraulic modeling for 13 engineered logjams on the river. Some of the logjams are for habitat restoration and some will restore the riverbank along a community park, said firm President Carlos Herrera. The most innovative aspect of the work is using logjams to reconnect the river to its floodplain and deflecting water flow into side channels long-abandoned by the river due to development.
“It not only provides habitat (for salmon) around the logjams, but opens up channels not used in 20 or 30 years,” said Herrera.
Cleaning up Georgetown
On another front, the firm is providing hazardous materials cleanup and civil engineering for the removal of the historic Georgetown Flume for Seattle Public Utilities. The flume is a remnant of the Georgetown steam plant, built at the turn of the century. It conveyed the cooling water from the plant to the Duwamish River. Over the years, industries and businesses in the area connected their drainage pipes to the flume, making it a major outfall into the Duwamish, Herrera said.
“For the last 100 years the industries in that area have been dumping contaminants down this flume into the river,” he said.
Herrera’s firm is cleaning up the contaminated sediments in the river; doing civil engineering on a project to replace the entire flume system with a pipe drainage flume system; and going into the drainage basin that connects to the flume to identify sources of contamination, and then taking steps to control them.
“We’re trying to see what’s feeding this contamination,” he said.
Employee ownership
Herrera Environmental Consultants took a new direction in 2005 when it became owned by its 120 employees.
“It’s meant going from a culture of where only a few people in the company were entrepreneurs to now where everyone in the company is entrepreneurs, and the mind-set that goes with that,” said Herrera.
He said the biggest issued faced by the consulting industry in this region is that there’s more work than engineers and scientific and technical staff to do it.
“Salary rates are increasing very rapidly in order to retain employees because there’s so much demand,” he said, but the firm’s public clients “won’t allow us to raise our rates accordingly.”
Therefore some engineering firms who bid projects before the rise in salaries are losing money on them, he said.
Herrera said he sees the long-term cost for planning, permitting and engineering of public and private projects locally going up.