Projects

A confidential developer needed to grade 108 acres to construct 142 residential lots, roadways, and open space areas.  The project included blasting and excavation to remove up to 24 feet of bedrock and overburden material.  When a neighboring property owner claimed that the construction activities had impacted his property, Northgate was retained to perform a third-party review of the client’s dust mitigation and monitoring program.

Northgate performed air monitoring and analysis, geologic mapping, and soil testing. We reviewed daily air sampling results, including PM10 dust measurements and asbestos concentrations to assess the effectiveness of engineering controls and potential offsite impacts.  Our fieldwork and data analyses demonstrated that the client’s mass grading activities did not adversely impact the neighboring properties and were compliant with the El Dorado County Air Pollution Control District regulations.  The client successfully settled the lawsuit, based in large part on Northgate’s robust and defensible technical analyses.

Northgate developed and implemented a programmatic regulatory strategy to assess liability in support of a case involving cost allocation and recovery for over 30 sites within a prominent gas company’s portfolio of properties. The projects ranged in both size and complexity.

Northgate assessed the appropriate regulatory framework and developed a systematic and defensible programmatic regulatory strategy which was used as the baseline for developing site-specific remedial approaches. These approaches were developed based on current and future land use, remediation timeline, nature and extent of contamination including impacted media, and operations and maintenance considerations.

For each site, three scenarios were developed including the minimum, expected, and maximum scenarios — representing the estimated minimum cost required to manage liability at the site, the estimated cost associated with a remedy most likely to be required by the regulatory agency, and the estimated cost for the most stringent feasible cleanup scenario based on regulatory guidance. Northgate also developed an innovative costing tool to develop rapid relative lifecycle costs for each scenario.

On behalf of Monterey Mechanical, a property owner along a section of Elmhurst Creek subject to periodic flooding, Northgate conducted environmental and geotechnical investigations and coordinated the CEQA permitting for this creek realignment, habitat restoration and bridge replacement project. Northgate worked with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the City of Oakland and the Design Team to develop the realignment and restoration plan and obtained agency approval. Debris was removed from the channel, the creek was dredged, channel reshaped and realigned to eliminate the flood potential. Northgate monitored and supervised the riparian habitat maintenance for a post-contraction period of five years.

Northgate staff managed sea level rise and storm surge evaluation and planning effort for the coastal town of Cohasset, Massachusetts. Work included frequency analysis of storm surge inundation events under different sea level rise scenarios; identifying municipal assets that would become flooded in these scenarios; developing new language for zoning, ordinance, building standard, and emergency management documents to respond to these threats; and aligning capital investment plan documents with the proposed new language.