Hello readers! First off, thank you for your patience while I took off a few weeks from blogging. I was getting a bit stressed out between my workload, continued attacks on our democratic systems, and some of my other hobbies. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent my time outside of work concentrating on Japanese language practice and playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. With some more relaxed time under my belt I’m feeling a bit more recharged and ready to take on website building and blogging again.
However, I’m going to change up the format a little bit for the future. In the past, I’ve posted all five of the bullets that I’m sending into hr@opm.gov to summarize my work for the week. This led to some long blog posts and meant that I dedicated all the time and energy that I had to blogging to talking about work. Truth is, I want to talk about my hobbies and leisure activities on my blog too.
Therefore, from now on, I’ll plan to post once a week about something interesting that I’ve done at work. For a few weeks, I’ll post some stories from the past month at work.
All that being said, let’s talk about a highlight from my May 19, 2025 report. I ran into a snag on one of my projects. Prior to any ground disturbing activity, we are required to document compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). I’m not an expert in this work, but I’ll share some of my perspective to help you understand my story. NEPA compliance includes multiple steps such as wetland delineation, tribal consultation, and documentation of historic and archaeological sites. We had most of these steps completed, except that we had not sent our report on archaeological and historical sites to the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO, often verbalized as Ship-O) for concurrence.
Ok, so what does all of that mean? We have a responsibility to not impact historic and archaeological resources. Obvious, digging holes (including boreholes for soil samples) could damage any buried resources. The SHPO concurrence process is the formal documentation that our activities will not impact any resources.
Without that concurrence, I don’t have legal permission to conduct any soil sampling. To add to the complexity of this challenge, the project manager and environmental protection specialist, were both out of office on parental leave. An unfortunate coincidence. I was very fortunate that some other staff stepped up to help me evaluate our options.
I had planned to perform a geophysical investigation to augment the borehole information. The original plan was do all of this work in a single mobilization to reduce costs. My pitch, to obtain some subsurface information and keep the project on schedule, was to perform the geophysical investigation as soon as possible, then mobilize a second time for the borings. Ultimately, the additional travel costs were considered acceptable, and we went ahead with collecting the geophysical data. But that is a subject for a future post.
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