Tetra Tech

History

2023: Tetra Tech accused of covering up scale of man-made disaster in Ohio

In February 2023, in Ohio (USA), about 50 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying highly toxic chemicals derailed and caught fire. Among them were strong poisons that have carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic effects on humans.

The very next morning, Norfolk Southern employees noticed a liquid spill in the Sulphur Run and Leslie Run streams and installed booms and retaining dams to separate floating pollutants. Toxic substances have entered the Ohio River, which is the most abundant tributary of the Mississippi River. Local residents within a radius of 2 km were evacuated, in the area of ​ ​ infection there is a massive death of fish, chickens and fox disease. But this is only what is known reliably.

Tetra Tech has been accused of concealing the scale of the man-made disaster in Ohio. Despite the Justice Department joining a lawsuit against Tetra Tech for falsifying samples at a shipyard, the Environmental Protection Agency in Ohio allowed Norfolk Southern to hire Tetra Tech for air testing.

All tests performed by the company turned out to be negative, and the railway and the Environmental Protection Agency say that everything around is safe. The media noted that the samples were not treated in accordance with federal standards, and experts actually considered them "careless" and "amateur." At the same time, the environmental agency confirmed that the samples were not properly preserved or acidified, but were considered "acceptable."

2018: Two employees killed due to small mine clearance experience

The US State Department issued a grant of $48 million to Tetra Tech for mine clearance in Syria in 2018. In addition to the fact that his approval was issued urgently in the last days of the presidency of US President Barack Obama to fix it before the inauguration of the new US leader Donald Trump, there were many complaints about why it was a grant, not a contract.

In addition to the story being bizarre and the grant "controversial," two Tetra Tech employees died during the mission. Most likely the reason for this was the "limited experience" of the ammunition removal company, as well as the "unusual circumstances" in which it was chosen for the profitable work to remove IEDs.

Interestingly, the news of the death of workers came amid an internal review by the US State Department of a much larger contract with the same Tetra Tech to defuse improvised explosive devices in hot spots around the world. At the same time, the company received an appointment from the Military-Political Office of the State Department for Arms Control (PMWRA). They did not comment on why they did not give other companies with extensive demining experience, such as Janus Global Operations, Optima, FSD/Crosstech, Mechem, UXB, DynCorps or NGO, the opportunity to bid for the Syrian project.

The contract, worth up to $850 million, has undergone an official internal review after a report by the conservative publication Free Beacon raised questions about the firm's security performance and little experience in this area.

2016: Forgery of soil test results at a radioactive site in San Francisco

Since 2004, the U.S. federal government has spent more than $1 billion to clean up and reclaim one of the most highly toxic and radioactive facilities in the U.S., the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. This facility from 1946 to 1969, was home to the Naval Radiological Protection Laboratory, and major Navy warships were towed there from the Pacific Ocean, where they were stationed near nuclear tests.

When the US authorities decided to transfer this site to the city, the question of the need to remove radiation and toxic chemicals became acute. A significant part of this work was carried out by Tetra Tech, one of the world's largest recovery companies, which had revenue of $2.6 billion in 2016. Tetra Tech has paid hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget to test and move heavily contaminated soil.

In 2016, the firm was accused of tampering with soil sample results. Comments from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published by the Government Environmental Responsibility Officers (PEER) division said 90 to 97% of soil sample results are "neither reliable nor justified."

Despite efforts to deny the allegations, in May 2018, two former executives involved in cleaning up radioactive contamination at the old navy yard pleaded guilty to falsifying soil sample results. In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Tetra Tech, accusing the engineering company of filing fake U.S. Navy billing applications based on falsified soil and building test data.