- Community Spotlight, Success Stories, Uncategorized
- Emergency Preparedness & Response
Supporting Response Efforts Following California Fires
Following the fires that devastated Los Angeles, California and surrounding areas in January 2025, CSS employee owners were deployed to the area as a subcontractor to Weston Solutions, Inc. to assist with the response. This effort supports U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 9 Superfund Technical Assessment & Response Team (START) program.
Initially, a CSS employee owner and a team that consisted of arborists, engineers, and electricians provided a safety recon for properties/parcels to identify immediate hazards—such as power lines, unstable buildings, and unsecure trees or limbs—to help ensure parcels were safe for entry. When necessary, the employee owner and team addressed the immediate hazard or flagged the property to address the hazards at a later date.
While on site, CSS employee owners managed various household hazardous materials (HHM) teams, documented removal, ensured safe handling and disposal of HHM, and managed equipment and supplies for responders.
Additional CSS staff have been supporting this effort remotely by procuring laboratories, validating data, preparing site quality assurance project plans, and supporting administrative duties.
While this team is highly experienced in fire response, due to the compressed timeline and number of structures involved, this task proved to be the most challenging. The unexpected challenge of mudslides inundating the areas only added to the complexity and delayed the response work.
Since the deployment, CSS has had five staff on site with two supporting from a remote location. CSS staff have been supporting this massive effort of over 300 STARTs on site and 40 working remotely, to over 9,120 Phase I clean-ups of household hazardous materials to fire impacted properties.
Visit EPA’s story board to view the full effort to date.
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Organizing Teams to Monitor Coastal Contaminants
For nearly 40 years NOAA’s National Mussel Watch Program has been monitoring contaminants in coastal waters in over 400 sites around the U.S. by testing sediment and bivalves, such as oysters and mussels. A CSS employee owner organizes and coordinates the regional missions to collect and test samples. This includes developing a schedule and coordinating…
New Heavily Desired High Resolution Land Cover Data for the U.S.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently announced the launch of the long desired high-resolution coastal land cover data. This highly anticipated data are available for most coastal areas of the U.S., including Alaska and the U.S. territories. CSS employee owners contributed to the release of this data set by participating in production activities and…
Quality Assurance Audit Reports
Since 1985 we’ve supported the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and have provided more than 1,600 quality assurance audit reports that the client has used to assess the quality of toxicology studies they sponsor. Over the last year our employee owners reviewed several studies involving per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) compounds, or “forever chemicals”,…