Top Tips and Tricks for Sampling of Contaminated Sites – PFAS and Other Contaminants

Improve how you collect and use contaminated site data by learning from local and international technical experts and a NSW EPA accredited site auditor. Ramboll experts Jim Fenstermacher (US), Neil Woodbridge (Australia and UK) and Rowena Salmon (Australia) will share their top tips and tricks for sampling of PFAS and asbestos, and will also explore the interpretation of data, including soil vapour data and TRH analytical results following silica gel clean-up. PFAS sampling will be discussed in the context of their physical properties and transport phenomena, and how those behaviours need to inform our field techniques when sampling for PFAS.

Rowena Salmon is a NSW EPA accredited contaminated land site auditor and is a Principal at Ramboll. Rowena has over 25 years of environmental consulting experience in Australia and New Zealand, primarily in the field of contaminated site assessment and remediation consulting and auditing, and has been with Ramboll since 2003. Rowena achieved her Site Auditor accreditation in 2010 and has been engaged to conduct over 130 audits in NSW and ACT since this time. Her site audit project highlights include numerous petroleum service station and depot sites across NSW, land release projects in Western Sydney, multiple asbestos remediation projects and involvement in the Barangaroo site audit for over 10 years, as well as other gasworks sites. Rowena holds a degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of NSW and currently manages the Ramboll Sydney site audit team.

Neil Woodbridge specialises in Contaminated Land Assessment, Compliance Assessments, Hazardous Materials Assessment, Environmental Due Diligence (EDD), and Remedial Strategies and Costings. He has over 20 years’ environmental consultancy experience predominantly in the field of environmental assessment of contaminated land. Having worked initially as a consultant in contaminated land for public and major private sector clients in the oil & gas, mineral, aerospace, infrastructure, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors in the UK, he then specialised in environmental due diligence within transaction support for the financial, commercial and property sectors, particularly cross-border transactions and compliance auditing at various locations across the world. In the latter part of his career he has managed contaminated land issues on State significant infrastructure projects and State asset privatisations, large industrial site decommissioning projects and works closely with legal firms serving as an expert witness notably on asbestos in soil matters.

Jim Fenstermacher is a thought leader on the fate, transport and remediation of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), and is the co-leader of Ramboll’s PFAS Subject Matter Expert team. In this role he brings technical support and information sharing, collaboration and technical expertise to client project teams. He engages in outreach to academia and supports bench-scale testing programs at Ramboll’s treatability laboratory in Liverpool, NY, evaluating PFAS removal and destruction technologies. He also provides project teams across the company with remediation technical expertise including, technology selection and design, training and mentoring staff across multiple technology practice groups. He has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a MS in Environmental Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.