Marine Infrastructure

Our permitting and regulatory support includes creating applications or documentation for compliance with critical areas ordinances, NPDES and state discharge requirements, dangerous/hazardous waste, Endangered Species Act, water rights, Clean Water Act, Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act, JARPA, NEPA/SEPA and FERC compliance. We also provide services to develop Environmental Impact Statements, Environmental Checklists and assessments to aid in obtaining regulatory approval.

GeoEngineers’ Construction Design Group delivers designs for the temporary structures needed during marine construction—trestles, piers and water-retaining systems like cofferdams. In addition to designs, GeoEngineers helps our clients understand how proposed structures and soil will behave under a variety of conditions and stresses—especially for projects in soft soils that are more vulnerable to seismic risks. Our engineers tailor their designs and risk analyses to each site and project-delivery method, including using performance-based engineering over traditional factor-of-safety methodology when appropriate.

Compliance is critical. We help your project stay compliant to local, state and Federal permit requirements by helping with applications or compliance monitoring during construction activities. We also coordinate conversations between the public and the many stakeholders typically involved in coastal projects to obtain buy-in and communicate important project information.

GeoEngineers’ dredging projects efficiently remove or place large amounts of underwater material to maintain the health, navigability and flood conveyance of waterways and ports. Our environmental experts can also characterize the dredged material and plan for its safe disposal in accordance with state and federal regulations.

Our environmental professionals have frequently managed large-scale remediation projects in historically contaminated industrial waterways. These complex sites are often affected by contamination from upland areas, and both recent and historical releases. Our team methodically investigates, characterizes, and then remediates these sites through a range of methods that manage costs for our clients by seeking out potentially liable parties, while returning the site to productive use.

For some projects, especially those built on soft soils or in seismically active regions, conventional force-based and factor of safety analysis approaches may not be adequate. In these cases, GeoEngineers looks to our Performance-Based Engineering (PBE) Team. PBE evaluates the reliability of the design by modeling a variety of real-world loads and conditions a structure is expected to face instead of just one design load and condition. This approach can be used to assess risks to marine structures such as piers, and then develop an efficient design. Funds that might have been needed to build a structure to a rigid, and sometimes unnecessary, factor-of-safety standard can be reallocated to address more meaningful risks. Visit our PBE Frontiers Page for more information on this growing service area.

Helping to mitigate risk is at the core of our consulting practice. We assess environmental risks that can cost our clients’ money, time and resources. We also use advanced safety assessment approaches, including performance-based strategies, to quantify the risks posed to marine structures by earthquakes and other geohazards. By identifying these risks early and offering mitigation strategies, we give our marine clients the tools to make smart, safe business decisions.

We help clients manage and organize their data. We use our in-house data management software platform, Earth Analytics, to help us monitor and manage instrument data. From discrete, short-term monitoring to expansive networks of wireless instruments tied into our software platform, we have the range of services to meet your needs.

GeoEngineers’ experts regularly perform critical areas assessments to evaluate the environmental, human and infrastructure risks at project sites. Critical areas are typically defined by local or regional authorities, and include sites that are flood-prone, biologically sensitive, geologically hazardous, critical to a water supply, or important to coastal conservation efforts. Our staff identifies these areas and provides recommendations for protection and mitigation that helps you to accomplish your project goals.