Latest news from Geovariances Environment Consulting Corner

Since summer 2016, Geovariances is involved in a project called Cartorisk funded by Ademe (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency), managed by eOde and also with the participation of Element Terre and Ginger Burgeap. The main objective of Cartorisk is to provide city planners, real estate companies… with tools for health risk estimation. These tools would help them better evaluate and plan the work needed to develop or clean up a site according to redevelopment objectives (i.e. parking, kindergarden,…). In this framework, Geovariances and eOde consultants are developing a geostatistics-based methodology for mapping and identifying health risks on contaminated sites. Real datasets are provided by Ginger Burgeap and Element Terre to develop test cases.

Geovariances also carries out GEOBAPA, another Ademe-funded project launched in summer 2016, in partnership with Soltracing and BG Ingénieurs Conseils.

Paris area development in the framework of the Grand Paris project will lead to big amounts of excavated soils. The key issue driving GEOBAPA is to facilitate the materials exchange resulting in an increase of the reuse rate of materials. It will also facilitate contaminated sites diagnostics. In that framework, GEOBAPA objective is to build a reference of the local geochemical background (in natural and anthropized environments). This reference will allow assessing the possibilities to reuse lands off site according to their geochemical level.

The first phase of the project consists in defining the state-of-the-art, collecting various data, mapping consistent areas and defining the sampling strategy for trial zones. It should be followed by sampling and mapping over the entire region.

For this purpose, our consultant is also involved in meetings and steering groups with Ademe and BRGM.

Our consultant Yvon Desnoyers was giving a 2-day training to ENRESA (the Spanish agency responsible for the management of radioactive waste and the dismantling of nuclear power plants) about Isatis specific features such as scripting for automatic procedures, exploratory data analysis, and so on.

CSN, the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council, also asked Geovariances to train ten of their employees in using Kartotrak for contaminated site characterization. The session ended with workshop where participants could apply their newly acquired skills to real issues.