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KANSAS CITY, Missouri (May 11, 2017) — Burns & McDonnell is expanding its Environmental Services team with the hiring of Rick Cramer. Cramer, who will serve as environmental technologies manager, has more than 30 years of experience providing strategic planning and technical direction for multidisciplinary environmental projects. 

“Our clients are facing an increasingly diverse range of regulations and challenges,” says Steve Nalefski, Burns & McDonnell vice president and Environmental Services general manager. “To help them meet those requirements, save cost and deliver projects on schedule, we’re continuing to grow the environmental services our team provides. We’re thrilled to have Rick — one of the best in the industry — join the team and support these efforts.”

Cramer joins the firm’s growing team of more than 450 environmental professionals focused on providing integrated services from planning and permitting to remediation, demolition and decommissioning for clients in California and nationwide. 

In his role, Cramer will focus on developing geology-based groundwater Conceptual Site Models (CSMs) for complex sites to successfully design and implement remediation strategies. The biggest challenge to groundwater projects is uncertainty associated with the subsurface caused by complex geology. Geology provides subsurface “plumbing” that is the primary control on groundwater movement and contaminant migration. Cramer pioneered the application of sequence stratigraphy to groundwater remediation projects in the early 1990s and developed the practice of Environmental Sequence Stratigraphy. This geology-based groundwater remediation method is now the standard for the Air Force Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC) base-wide CSM program and is considered an emerging best practice by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“An inadequate understanding of preferred contaminant migration pathways in the subsurface can cause groundwater remediation projects to underperform,” Cramer says. “Our stratigraphy methodology constructs a more accurate subsurface framework based on decades of research. I’m looking forward to continuing to identify ways to help clients save time, money and resources through this methodology and other environmental technological advances.”

Cramer is a registered professional geologist in California and holds two degrees — a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of the Pacific and master’s degree in geology from the University of California-Davis. 

About Burns & McDonnell

Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies made up of more than 5,700 engineers, architects, construction professionals, scientists, consultants and entrepreneurs with offices across the country and throughout the world. We strive to create amazing success for our clients and amazing careers for our employee-owners. Burns & McDonnell is 100 percent employee-owned and is proud to be No. 16 on Fortune’s 2017 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.