Quality control: Fulcrum Environmental team helps clients face regulatory realities

When environmental consultant Travis Trent and his wife purchased their century-old South Hill home, they knew its flaking exterior paint contained lead.

“We had two young children,” Trent recalled, “so we decided not to let them play in the yard until we had the paint scraped and the dirt hauled away.”

A few months later, during a routine medical checkup, Trent suggested having his kids’ blood lead levels tested. The results came back three times higher than the national average.

Why?

“We had a dog at the time,” Trent explained, “and apparently it would go outside and bring lead back in on its fur. Crazy.”

Once the paint and dirt were removed, the children’s lead level returned to normal.

Fulcrum Environmental Consulting helps clients comply with worker and environmental safety regulations. Trent, one of three co-owners, also fields daily calls about residential indoor air quality. During a recent interview, he discussed ways to reduce health risks.

S-R: Where did you grow up?

Trent: In Deer Park.

S-R: Did you have a career in mind?

Trent: Absolutely. I was going to be a New York stockbroker and make vast amounts of money.

S-R: What happened?

Trent: The Wall Street dream crashed my first year of college when I found accounting classes mind-numbing. Then I was going to be a social worker until I realized it was stressful and paid poorly. Next I wanted to be an archaeologist, but quickly discovered it was more about toothbrushes than Indiana Jones. I also thought about being a psychiatrist, but decided medical school wasn’t really my gig.

S-R: How did you end up in geology?

Trent: While attending a family reunion in South Dakota, I did some caving in the Black Hills and loved it. I figured I’d earn a Ph.D. in geology and get paid to study caves. So I started working on a bachelor’s degree in geology at Eastern.

S-R: What happened to the Ph.D.?

Trent: The year before I graduated, the price of gold plummeted, the U.S. Bureau of Mines laid off half its workforce, and suddenly I was competing with about 400,000 experienced, unemployed geologists. While working on a master’s, I saw an opening was for an environmental consultant. I had no idea you could go from college knowing essentially nothing to a job where people are asking you questions, but I joined Fulcrum in 1995, and I’ve worked here ever since.

S-R: Did you have a mentor?

Trent: Peggy Williamson, one of the firm’s three partners. She has a phenomenal ability to explain regulations. But what really sets her apart is her brutal honesty, which engenders strong client loyalty.

S-R: What job experience did you have before joining Fulcrum?

Trent: I worked in the Ridpath Hotel’s banquet department during high school and college.

S-R: Did anything you learned there translate to this job?

Trent: A lot, surprisingly. Hospitality and professional services such as consulting both involve interpersonal relationships. If you get along well with people and are easy to work with, it helps.

S-R: Is geology cyclical?

Trent: Consulting is more stable than the mineral industry. Every so often when we post an opening, we get a wave of people. I’ve sat across from a guy whose previous job was running a 3,000-person mine somewhere in South America, and now he’s interviewing for an entry-level position that pays $35,000.

S-R: Do overqualified people get hired?

Trent: Sometimes. But people with experience don’t always have the skill set we’re looking for. I’d say 90 percent of our hires are straight out of college.

S-R: How has your job evolved during the past two decades?

Trent: When I first came into the industry, asbestos was the big driver. School districts were very concerned about their liabilities, and wanted consulting staff on site essentially full time to make sure it was being handled appropriately. Then around 2000, mold became the flavor of the day. Some lady in Texas sued and got a couple of million dollars. Ed McMahon’s dog died. Suddenly mold was in the national news, and we got phone calls every day. Radon had a brief moment in the sun about eight or nine years ago, then disappeared from the public’s perception – which is ironic, since of all the things I deal with, it’s probably one of the larger health hazards. Radon is blamed for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year.

S-R: Have you ever tested your office (at 207 W. Boone Ave.) for radon?

Trent: (laugh) One day I was testing another building and got conflicting readings. So I told my staff to set up all our meters in the office over the weekend to check that they read the same, since I knew we didn’t have radon. We have no basement, and we sit on basalt, while radon is typically linked to granite. But when we came back Monday, every meter read 25 (picocuries per liter), and the EPA recommends taking corrective measures for anything above 4. “That’s impossible,” I said. So we retested the building periodically for nine months, and kept getting readings between 20 and 30.

S-R: What did you do?

Trent: I paid someone to put in a mitigation system.

S-R: What do you like most about your job?

Trent: I have a tremendous amount of autonomy – I can work any 60 hours of the week I want to. (laugh) I also travel to remarkable places, see inside amazing buildings, and the job pays well. But it’s a career where you have to be pretty serious about your continuing education.

S-R: Anything you wish you’d done differently?

Trent: I finished all the course work for my master’s degree, and just had the thesis left. Looking back, I probably could have wrapped up my master’s degree without much effort.

S-R: Would that have made a difference in your career?

Trent: Not at all. But my grandmother would have appreciated it.

S-R: When you explain your job to someone, do they ask for an off-the-cuff diagnosis?

Trent: Sure. Things like, “Every time my sister goes home, she gets headaches and starts sneezing and coughing. Can you tell me what’s wrong with her house?”

S-R: Can you?

Trent: Sometimes. The biggest growth area in our industry is indoor air quality. We work mostly with commercial and educational settings, but I suspect the residential market is coming next. That smell you notice when you buy a new car is plastic and other products off-gassing. Likewise, as our buildings become tighter and underventilated, we’re ending up with this soup of different things in the air. We don’t understand the holistic effect, but for some portion of the population, that exposure results in an increased sensitivity. Statistics on childhood asthma are shooting through the roof.

S-R: What year was your house built?

Trent: 1907.

S-R: Did you test it for radon?

Trent: Yes. It had a radon system in it when we got there. It also had asbestos and the outside was slathered in lead paint. It was like a bomb shelter – I’d lose cellphone coverage whenever I walked inside. But we had the lead paint and dirt removed, and asbestos is not a huge hazard unless you disturb it.

S-R: What general advice would you offer homeowners?

Trent: With new houses, your risk for radon goes up a little bit because the houses are more airtight. With older houses – pre-1980 – the principal concerns are lead paint, asbestos-containing materials and radon, which is fairly ubiquitous. One thing I encourage people to look for is vermiculite – that fluffy stuff in the attic. In our market, 90-plus percent of that came out of Libby, and there are some real health hazards tied to that. I keep expecting some agency to say this stuff is really dangerous, but they’ve stayed fairly circumspect. I suspect that’s because no politician wants to tell hundreds of thousands of homeowners that the house they bought is now worth less because it’s been tagged as hazardous. If there’s a risk of the vermiculite being disturbed, the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency has some very helpful information for homeowners.

S-R: If you had vermiculite in your home, what would you do?

Trent: I’d stay out of the attic.