Smith leaves Travis cleaner than he found it

  • Published
  • By Merrie Schilter-Lowe
  • 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --   Many would like to say that they left Travis Air Force Base, California, in better condition than they found it. In Mark Smith's case, he can say that. And honestly.

Smith, Air Force Civil Engineer Center's Western Region Restoration Support Team lead at Travis, has been the environmental restoration program manager since 2003. After 35 years of federal civilian service with both the Navy and Air Force, Smith retires April 1.

Smith, Glenn Anderson and Lonnie Dukes made up the environmental restoration team with input from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. They also receive input from the restoration advisory board and the public. 

"We have built on the legacy of my predecessors and accomplished some rather amazing objectives," Smith said in his last article for the Guardian, the base's quarterly environmental newsletter for stakeholders and community leaders. "Reaching agreement with the regulatory agencies on all of our soil and groundwater cleanup actions was huge." 

Smith and his team worked with the regulatory agencies to put in place remedies for almost every contaminated soil, sediment, surface water and groundwater site on base.

Travis has been on the EPA's National Priorities List since 1989. The NPL includes military and civilian locations throughout the United States and its territories with the most contaminants, hazardous waste or pollutants. 

Smith began his career with the military in 1981.  After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he came to California as a design engineer working on fast attack submarines at the Mare Island Navy Shipyard, Vallejo, California. A few years later, he was selected to coordinate efforts on one of the small submersibles. 

When Mare Island was tapped for Base Realignment and Closure, Smith got a job performing nondestructive testing of high explosives for Naval Air Command at the Naval Weapons Station, Concord, California. Later, he took a position in information technology.

When the Concord facility was slated for BRAC, Smith was placed in the civilian priority placement program. He was interviewing for a Navy job at Indian Head, Maryland, when terrorists attacked the Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001. 

"I remember having to leave the base and seeing the smoke from the Pentagon on the way back to the hotel," Smith said.  "It was a horrible time and we ended up driving cross country to get home. Every highway contractor had a U.S. flag proudly mounted on their crane and raised high into the air." 

In December 2001, Smith landed a job as head of maintenance engineering with the 60th Civil Engineer Squadron at Travis. A year later, he was asked to become director of the installation restoration program.

Although the program was already two decades old, there was still plenty of work to be done.

There were eight restoration program staff members when Smith became the lead. With his retirement, there are now only two staff members and the environmental contractor.

"We took some risks by bringing in unproven cleanup technologies, demonstrating that they could be effective and we were able to implement many of these green and sustainable technologies into everyday actions," Smith said.  

Innovative technologies include injecting materials into the subsurface to stimulate biological or chemical processes that break down contaminants in groundwater.  

Phytoremediation was one of the technologies. In 1998, an environmental engineering and consulting firm and a team from Utah State University planted a grove of red-bark eucalyptus trees on the western side of the base to absorb and break down dissolved solvents which move through the tree sap and out the branches and leaves.

Not only have such technologies been successful, they cost far less than the more traditional method of extracting millions of gallons of groundwater, treating it and then discharging it to Union Creek, according to Anderson, the team's hydrologist. 

To avoid the cost of building, operating and maintaining extensive pump and treat systems, Anderson said the team looked for remediation technologies that saved money and were green and sustainable.   

This out-of-the-box thinking helped garner the team the Gen. Thomas D. White Restoration Award in 2010 for the top environmental restoration program in Air Mobility Command.

In addition to managing the base's cleanup efforts, Smith oversaw the conversion from a traditional contracting method focused on processes or technologies to a performance-based contract, which he explained is a better way of doing business.  

"The performance-based contract allows the Air Force to buy measurable objectives rather than a specific set of steps to a deliverable," he said recently to new restoration advisory board members. "We don't tell the contractor how to do their job, but rather what we want accomplished."

This way of doing business has allowed the environmental restoration team to speed up cleanup efforts at Travis using innovative solutions while saving tax dollars, Smith said. 
 
According to Mike Wray, CHM2HILL environmental contractor project manager, Smith raised the bar for managing performance-based contracts.  "Thanks, Mark, for an incredible 14 years working together at Travis," Wray said at Smith's retirement luncheon. "You have raised the bar for managing performance-based remediation work and providing support to the entire team needed to accomplish the lofty goals of such projects."