ECC was awarded the 2023 Secretary of the Army Environmental Award in Environmental Restoration, the US Army’s highest honor for outstanding environmental stewardship and leadership, for innovative technology optimization efforts at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP), a Superfund site listed on the National Priorities List. ECC has managed the fence-to-fence environmental restoration at LCAAP since 2014, successfully implementing remedial action-operations and optimization strategies aimed at reducing life-cycle costs for active groundwater remedies at 35 sites throughout the 3,935-acre installation. ECC performed operations and maintenance of a groundwater pump-and-treat system; in-situ bioremediation amendment injections to support enhanced reductive dichlorination; vapor intrusion investigation; groundwater investigations using direct-push technology; well installations and abandonment; and sampling and analysis. ECC optimized existing systems and installed new remedies to achieve Remedy-In-Place; decreased remedial action operations costs by 60 percent annually through transitioning in-situ bioremediation amendments; implemented a monitoring remediation optimization system to reduce long-term monitoring costs by 50 percent; and reduced monitored natural attenuation time frames to less than 15 years for multiple sites.

Under a new award, ECC is currently performing high-resolution site characterization of a dense nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPL) source pit using dye-enhanced laser-induced fluorescence and sonic whole-core soil sampling; in-situ thermal remediation of the DNAPL source pits using gas-fired thermal conduction; implementation of the first-ever solar-powered electrokinetic bioremediation of a groundwater plume containing explosives; and a metal translator study to allow discharge of the treated groundwater from the pump-and-treat system to a surface water discharge.