Combatting contaminated lands: Meet Richard Somerville
Richard Somerville is Technical Director from our Environment business line.
In Richard’s 21-year-career as an environmental engineer, he’s managed programs and projects that include contaminated site investigation and remediation, hydrogeological assessments, and water resource management.
What have been the most rewarding projects you’ve worked on in your career?
Unsurprisingly, Defence projects come to mind. A couple of projects I worked on presented new types of environmental challenges that needed strong teamwork across discipline areas to solve. We also needed to be flexible to changing scope, context, and stakeholder needs, and evolve as we uncovered technical knowledge on these new challenges with no precedent. There were also immersive and extensive stints in the field.
In your role leading our contaminated land services teams for our Defence clients, what key skills and strategies do you often use?
While all project management fundamentals are important, change and people are especially important for contamination projects. I seek to understand the client and project drivers and the scope and then match the right team for what is required. Everyone has different strengths and ways of working, so understanding these and figuring out ways to align them with project needs supports delivery. You can plan and make decisions based on the information available to you, but nothing is certain, and planning for change and managing it effectively is critical for success.
How do you build and maintain strong relationships with clients when you’re working on complex projects like contaminated land remediation?
A good kick-off meeting and establishing regular and open communications (both verbal and written so everybody remembers what we spoke about previously). Building a good relationship makes it a lot easier to manage and tackle changes when they happen and means everyone can share in success. It’s also important to understand the unique requirements and systems of our clients so we can deliver. This doesn’t happen straight away but through learning from feedback and applying these to other tasks and projects.
How does your work in contaminated land management contribute to positive environmental outcomes? Can you share some examples of projects where significant environmental improvements were achieved?
When you design a remediation project with sustainability principles, and these are met, there are clear social and environmental benefits. Land investigation and risk assessments can solve uncertainties about a site and surrounding environment so that it can be released for beneficial uses.
In what ways do you engage with local communities during environmental projects? How do you ensure that their concerns and needs are addressed throughout the project lifecycle?
It depends on the project. Where there is engagement with a local community, it’s important to actually listen to them, and understand what’s important to them and what information they need. From there, stakeholder engagement specialists, supported by technical people, can clearly communicate project objectives, findings and next steps in a way that meets the community’s needs,
Richard’s leadership has been instrumental in our 20+ years of delivering robust and consistent environmental services to the Australian Defence sector.