Soil and Subsurface Investigations

Spray Irrigation and Re-use
Land Application of Residual Sludges
Groundwater Modeling
Phase I & II Environmental Site Assessments
Storm Water Management Services
Septic System Evaluations (“Perc Tests”)

Residential/Community Systems

Municipal/Industrial Systems

Over 35% of the households in North Carolina use on site waste water disposal systems. In North Carolina over 40,000 permits and in South Carolina over 30,000 permits are generated annually for waste water system installations. The remaining households are tied to local or regional waste water treatment plants (WWTP) which collect, treat and dispose of the highly treated waste water to near-by surface waters. Newly adopted laws have placed limits on the amount of Nitrogen that can be discharged annually from these systems. On July 22, 1997 a series of government regulations were adopted by the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission (the “EMC”) in response to the well known fish kills which have occurred in the Neuse River primarily in and around the New Bern/Craven County area. The regulation is commonly referred as the Neuse River Buffer Rule (“NRBR”). Many municipalities in order to comply with the NRBR have re-opened spray irrigation facilities to help achieve the overall goal of a 30% reduction of the total amount of nitrogen entering the River.

Protocol Sampling Service, Inc. has helped the municipalities of the Town of Fremont (160,000 GPD), the City of Kinston (260,000 GPD) and the Town of La Grange (500,000 GPD) reduce their overall Nitrogen discharge to the Neuse River Basin and take advantage of the nutrient content of the waste water to support local crops. The same technologies used in designing the larger systems are used in smaller, individual systems, especially on “problem soils”. Protocol Sampling Service, Inc. personnel use state-of-the-art technologies to help design and guide the installation of conventional and innovative disposal systems throughout the State to either over come “problem soils’ or maximize lot density and profit without impacting environmentally sensitive areas.

Protocol Sampling Service, Inc. performs ground water modeling on sites in which treated waste water or storm water is discharged to the subsurface soil and ground water aquifer. The Colorado mound model, the Artificial Recharge computer program authored by Dave Molden, D.K. Sunada and Jim Warner with Colorado State University is used on sites in which highly treated waste water or storm water is discharged to the subsurface to ensure no “breakout” occurs. In more complicated environments or on projects that plan to discharge more than 25,000 gallons per day, a three dimensional groundwater flow model developed by the USGS, MODFLOW2000 code running with the Groundwater Modeling System (GMS) Modeling Shell is used. The GMS is used as the preprocessor to translate boundary conditions, aquifer properties, recharge, observation well data and aquifer layer geometry from GIS map coverages to the necessary MODFLOW2000 formats.