An Environmental Toolkit for Expeditionary Operations
The Environmental Toolkit for Expeditionary Operations was first conceptualized as a method to unify expeditionary inventories with off-the-shelf components and products. Now, 10 years later, the toolkits are sent across the world to aid troops and civilians working toward disaster relief. Watch this video to learn more.
Transcript
00:00:09 so I'm Mark Chapel I'm a soil Scientist by training and I lead the soil andent geochemistry team here in the environmental laboratory and I'm responsible for the development and the transition of the What's called the environmental toolkit for expeditionary operations it's a screening tool designed to give uh folks that are deployed in the into the field like
00:00:35 active duty and civilians uh give them a sense in terms of potential environmental contaminants that may exist in forward operating areas particularly particularly to Aid them in and when they're setting up bases or when maybe they're trying to clean up uh H spills or diffic or hazards that may exist on the basis that uh originated about 10 years ago um it was originally
00:00:58 started the whole idea on the kit was originally constructed by um Brandon laferty who is uh formerly a member of my team and now uh in management within environmental laboratory and it was just designed to really collect uh get a collection of different sensors that were commercially off theh shelf readily available easily usable by folks that aren't trained in rigorously trained in
00:01:24 analytical chemistry and those kind of capabilities so luckily we had the technology uh it was available to package all these sensors together and so that we've created a essentially a mobile package that packs into a Pelican case and we've shipped these all over the world yeah I think it was mostly dependent upon what technology that we felt was we felt most confident about
00:01:47 that could be easily deployed um some you know there's a lot of different sensors out there and some of them are much more complicated and require a higher level of expertise that you don't expect with the professional military so we we really focused on those capabilities that were um informative and also easy to use and so that's kind of we we settled down just a four
00:02:08 different sensors that cover a wide range of potential contaminants in both so in soil and water and sediment and then also an air as well so we try to cover all the main environmental compartments but again it's a screening tool so it's not a full capability but it gives you a sense of where you may have issues and where you may need to collect samples and consider sending
00:02:31 those to more of an established laboratory to get your final results if there's something in the environment that would give you a red flag um the toolkit is designed to kind of point that out for you and to give you some guidance in terms of where to maybe where you need to you need to go collect a sample you need to consider getting a more established laboratory to do a
00:02:50 thorough analysis on material we can generally get really good feedback a lot of these people that are deployed overseas who are trying to make Assessments in terms of these forward operating bases is typically are deployed with very little analytical chemistry capabilities and so the toolkit represents something for them that they can kind of make a rapid
00:03:11 assessment and they don't have to necessarily equip themselves to send samples back to the US and they don't have to wait to get results back for particular hazards that may exist where they want to set up an operation [Music]