News
MFA Recognized by Highwire for Gold Safety Award
MFA Receives Highwire’s 2022 Gold Safety Award Highwire, a cloud-based mobile platform that empowers clients to make smarter risk management decisions, has announced the recipients of its prestigious safety awards. Maul Foster & Alongi has…
Caitlin BryanPlanning for Environmental Justice
This blog was co-authored by Project Environmental Scientist Haley McDaniel. What Is Environmental Justice in Planning? National Community Planning Month is an opportune time to consider how pollution doesn’t impact all people…
Sarah SieloffEPA Proposes Designating PFAS as Hazardous Substances under CERCLA
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on August 26, 2022, that it is proposing to designate two of the most common and most studied PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) compounds as hazardous substances under the…
Erik NaylorShould You Be Pursuing an EPA Brownfields Grant? Now is the Time to Decide
Why first-movers may see advantages this year It’s the most wonderful time of the year, sort of. EPA recently released updates related to this year’s competition for grants in its Brownfields Program. The 2022 call for grant applications…
Sarah SieloffResults for "Health & Safety"
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oregon OSHA (OR-OSHA) is preparing rules to protect workers from infectious diseases. The rulemaking process has been dynamic, to say the least, which should not be surprising given the nature of the…
Bill Beadie, CIHThe impact of COVID-19 is so widespread that planning to operate or re-open a business today can be overwhelming. The complex scientific, economic, political, legal, and cultural issues present a daunting challenge to anyone tasked with…
Bill Beadie, CIHOver the last few weeks, Oregon and Washington industries have had to implement significant changes to their operations to protect their employees and the public, and comply with shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines related…
Ada H. Banasik, PECoronavirus (COVID-19) is no joke. The swift spread of this virus and the surrounding news updates have many—if not all—of our Pacific Northwest-based staff thinking about how to stay safe while best practices for addressing the virus are…
Kate ElliottOccasionally, I look around and realize that things have changed. It’s usually a small thing here and little thing there, and then I realize that the world has evolved into a different place. Recently, I realized that the world of ammonia…
Bill Beadie, CIHFor many of MFA’s geologists, environmental scientists, and chemists, summer means long days of fieldwork at the Bunker Hill Superfund Site (BHSS), conducting several different concurrent environmental investigations. The BHSS includes areas…
Erik NaylorCompliance at industrial facilities is important 365 days a year, and each season comes with its own compliance challenges. As we head into the summer season, here are our top tips to ensure your facility remains compliant. Stormwater…
Ashlyn SalzmanYou may have heard of “PFAS” in a documentary or in the news recently. You also may have heard that, in the U.S., PFAS chemicals are in drinking water and in people’s blood. And you would be right to say—what!? How can this be? This…
Erik NaylorPSM/RMP for the Uninitiated: The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) both enforce similar requirements for facilities that have more than the threshold quantity of listed…
Bill Beadie, CIHIn our daily lives we are constantly exposed to ever-changing mixtures of chemicals, and existing tools for figuring out how these chemical mixtures affect our health are not necessarily comprehensive. This is largely because they do not…
Phil Wiescher, PhDAsk ten people about process safety management (PSM), and chances are at least seven of them will tell you about mountains of paperwork designed primarily to keep auditors happy. They might say, “I spend so much time doing paperwork that I…
Bill Beadie, CIHClearly EPA is reading my blog, because only nine days after I posted a summary of lingering questions about proposed PSM/RMP changes (link), EPA has responded with a final version of the updated rule (link) and a summary of frequently asked…
Bill Beadie, CIHPSM/RMP for the uninitiated: The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) both enforce similar requirements for facilities that have more than the threshold quantity of…
Bill Beadie, CIHJames Peale, RG, LHG, Principal Hydrogeologist at MFA, authored the recent article, Lead in Drinking Water: Steps to take as a Business Owner, published in the Vancouver Business Journal July 8, 2016. Click the link below to read his full…
Alistaire Clary, PEIt was a hot August day when I first saw the building—fenced off and surrounded by brown, crunchy grass, it was a five-story building with boarded-up windows and broken glass. When I finally got to enter the building, I suited up in Tyvek™…
Katie StrommeThe current issue of EPA’s Chemical Emergency Prevention and Planning newsletter features Bill Beadie’s article on mechanical integrity programs in the section titled “Best Practices from the Field.” The article describes a…
Bill Beadie, CIH