Isaac (00:10): What is up everybody? Isaac Harris with Civil Engineering Academy. Excited to be with you on another podcast episode I bring a special guest on today. His name is Travis Joel Keener. He is he goes by the spill plan man, that you go check him [email protected]. And he works pretty much exclusively here on SPCC plans. If you don't know what that means, that stands for spill Prevention Control and Counter Measure. These are plans that you have to develop anytime you have oil filled tanks or whatnot, and making sure everything is contained. There's actually quite a bit that goes into it. And so, Travis details his journey into this world of SPCC plans, how he came into this. I think it's a fascinating industry. I worked on SPCC plans when I started out of college in the utility world with transformers at substations. But Travis details how he got into this world and really how he's running his own business now doing this.

Isaac (01:01): He's worked for 80,000 employee businesses as well as just himself. So he's got a lot of experience working with SPCC. He's got a lot of experience in this industry, in the environmental world. He is a licensed professional engineer. He did it in chemical engineering, but a lot of what he works on is in the civil world. So there's just a wealth of information that we covered. I think it'll be really fascinating, especially if you have any interest in learning more about SPCC plans or diving into this environmental world. This is gonna be a great episode for you. And I can't leave without mentioning. If you still need help passing your PE exam, go check us out at civil PE review course.com or civil engineering academy.com. You'll find courses all there for you. If you need help on your journey to pass, or if you just need exams, those are there for you too as well. So I will go ahead and shut up. Lemme get to my interview with Travis. It's coming up right after this. We'll see you in a minute. Alright, Travis, we are rocking and rolling. Thanks for joining me today on the Civil Engineering Academy podcast. I appreciate you doing this with me.

Travis (02:02): Thank you, Isaac.

Isaac (02:04): I'm excited. I know your background is chemical, but a lot of the work you're doing is, is very much tied to, to the civil world. So I think you got some fascinating stories I wanna draw out and kinda give people a perspective of maybe some of the fields that they could go into as mm-hmm . Civil engineers that may maybe they haven't even thought about. But I think today as we talk about this, it'll all kind of come out of that. But why don't you why don't we start this off. Why don't you tell us your own journey into chemical engineering, how you found yourself doing what you do today?

Travis (02:37): Okay. Yeah. I started down the chemical engineering path. Just really, I, I didn't come from a family of engineers. My dad built custom homes. We were handed a piece of paper in a business math class in high school. And of course, engineering salaries were near the top of several four year degrees that you could get. And chemical engineering was at the very top back in the 1990s when I was looking at it. And so what would any, you know, normal money, , normal southern American family, do you know? And, and, and I was so determined not to change majors in school because I was not a, a very academic guy. I mean, I, I, I blood, sweat and tears, and thankfully my parents helped me enough. I didn't have to work a second job, but I made good grades. You know, I made it like a three six. But man, it, it was tough. And, and if I really would've gone after the, the trade that I was interested in, it would've been civil engineering because I was enamored by guys that knew how to build ponds and build bridges and, you know, build things that we use every day. And you know, chemical engineering is pretty much it's all inside of a pipe or a reactor, and you don't, you don't really get to necessarily, you know, enjoy it the way the way you do civil engineering projects. But, but what happened was, I went to work for a large chemical company. It used to be tied to Eastman Kodak, the camera company. And thankfully because I was a chemical engineer at a chemical company when I started realizing, man, this is a lot like being in college. I don't like balancing equations and things like that, they let me go into marketing.

Travis (04:14): And so, like, you know, you switch from a hard hat and flame retardant clothes in high steam environments to wearing a Titleist, you know, golf cap and playing golf with customers. , I was like, I've dying and gone to heaven, you know? But years later, kind of zooming ahead, I thought I would retire there. But years later, they sold the polyethylene division. 400 people now went to work for a company that was out of Asia. I, I would've got the same pay, same job, same title, same phone number. But we decided to move back to Oklahoma. I went to work at a contractor really doing mechanical engineering. We were looking for corrosion in pressure vessels, piping tanks. And, and so I kind of learned how do you approach big companies? How, how do you know you, you have to get into IS net world with drug and alcohol probably, or, or some other service. You, you have to have the right insurance. It's just a ticket to the ball game, and you can complain about it. Or you can just say, Hey, I wanna, you know, I wanna try to get a job with somebody that's not afraid to write a big paycheck. And I don't wanna make it sound like I, I make a lot of money. I, I would've made more money by staying at a big company, probably. But I eventually, that company got sold. It went from 400 to 80,000 people. And so I worked at that big of a company, 150 countries, got to travel a little bit internationally. But eventually I was handed a filing cabinet with 700 s spill plans, the SP's spill Prevention control and countermeasure. It was from a World War II pilot. I never got to meet him. He was 89 when I got handed the filing cabinet.

Travis (05:57): And he, he didn't live much longer after that. But I, I never done a spill plan, never worked for anybody that had done one. I was just chomping at the bit to be able to start out on my own. And I'd gotten my PE license in chemical engineering oh, probably five years before. And I hadn't done a single thing with my PE at the time. And now, because these s spill clans have to be stamped according to the EPA I've stamped like 600 of them mm-hmm . And so you know, I hear some guys are like, I'm gonna get my PE for the title, but I don't wanna stamp anything 'cause I don't wanna mess up. Well, if anybody could have been afraid of messing up, it could have been me because I wasn't super confident on my calculations. But, you know, once you do something over and over and over and then you double check it with other technology, or I come in behind people and I calculate something that's already been calculated by another engineer, you, you, you begin to get your confidence. So it's just kind of, it was just very probably unique to be handed a filing cabinet full of spill plans. And that's how I got started.

Isaac (07:02): So now you're the spill plan man. Right. And that's Bill, that, is that what you're doing?

Travis (07:08): That's a term that a lady in California tagged me as not too long ago. And I thought that that is kind of what I, you know,

Isaac (07:16): Got you

Travis (07:16): SoYeah, I, I, I just I operate in probably eight or nine states as an LLC, and then I probably the rest of the 42 states I'm licensed in, I'm, I'm a sole proprietor. Some states it's just so complicated to be licensed as an LLC, you know, unless you're really getting a lot of business in that state, you know, so that's kind of...

Isaac (07:40): Let me imagine, . Well, that's awesome. So for those that are listening, they might not know even what SPCC plans are. And you, you kind of highlighted what that acronym meant, but what, what exactly, you know, high level, what is SPCC? What are we doing with that?

Travis (07:58): Well, it's a rule that came out in 1973, and it basically is focused on preventing oil from giving, getting into navigable waters of the US. Now, if you've watched the news, defining waters of the US is not very easy, depending on what administration is in office, it can go one way or the other. But pretty much if you have a tank of oil containing product can be crude oil, it can be gasoline, jet fuel, you're gonna have to have a secondary containment system around that and cast case that tank leaks. And you're gonna have to have a document that's 50 to a hundred pages long that tells who's gonna clean up the spill, how are we gonna prevent it things like that. And when you sign off on that as a professional engineer, you're signing off on kind of like five cardinal things. You're saying, I'm aware of the law. Either me or my agent went to the site. I've developed inspection procedures for this. This is an adequate plan for the facility. Kind of, you're kind of signing off on a, on five cardinal rules that the EPA wants you to have. And one other kind of caveat on it, the EPA is the one that makes it an engineering project. They're, they're the ones that say an engineer, a PE has to stamp it. They don't require you to be licensed in the state that it's in, but the state engineering boards, as you can imagine, they're wanting you to pay your fee and mm-hmm . License in their state if you're gonna come in there and stamp something. So you're on, you know, maybe the EPA doesn't care what the state boards do, and that's what led me to getting my license in so many places.

Isaac (09:29): Yeah. You're licensed in 42 states, if, if I recall that. So,

Travis (09:35): Yeah.

Isaac (09:35): How do you keep track of that? That, because there's a lot of continuing ed, there's a lot of

Travis (09:40): No Microsoft Excel, that's all you had to do is build a spreadsheet. No, I, after a while, I, I really did have to start utilizing some of these people that send you emails, Hey, we offer continuing education . I'm like, you know, I, I, I do have to figure out, because some states have a certain ethics, some have a, a sexual harassment training, some ha it has to be in person. Some allow you to do a webinar. You, you almost need an expert in training at that point to keep, it's not that hard once you get going, but it's it, it, it helps to have people that know

Isaac (10:13): , that's your part-time job.

Travis (10:15): Yeah.

Isaac (10:15): Keeping up with continuing ed Requirements.

Travis (10:18): Exactly. Yeah.

Isaac (10:20): Incredible. So you have 42 states. Are you gonna shoot for 50 or just as work demands? It,

Travis (10:26): I only do it as work demands. It, except for if you were to look at a map right now, it would be all the continental United States except Idaho and New England. And you can barely tell that New England's not in there. But Idaho sticks out like a sore thumb. So I'm like, come on, somebody, gimme a job in Idaho. ,

Isaac (10:42): You gotta get one. You live in Utah, so you must have been here. And my background, I started my civil career doing SPCC plans. That's similar to what you had. I was working for a utility and all of a sudden, you know, that that requirement to do that was landing in the group I was with. And so, you know, I ended up having to look at plans, drawings, make sure they're updated.

Travis (11:07): Yeah.

Isaac (11:08): Um it was, it was a lot of work. And now that's been passed to other people, but it got my eyes open to s what SPCC plans are.

Travis (11:16): Yeah.

Isaac (11:17): And I think, you know, as a civil engineer that's out there, maybe they, no one's thought about that even as a, a career, maybe more on the environmental side of.

Travis (11:27): Right.

Isaac (11:27): Of the equation, which sounds like is a pathway they could go if they, if they wanted to.

Travis (11:32): It's, it is because there, there's estimates that there are like 3 million spill plans in America. So just imagine if I've stamped 600, there's a lot more out there than what I've ever touched. And so that, that is a very true statement. And the specialty that I've kind of offered to my clients is, I, I have my license in a lot of states, so everybody I work for has an engineer. Usually they just may want me to do a job in a far away place. And then number two, I measure the containment a lot. So I used to, when I was back in Oklahoma, I was a licensed engineering firm and land surveying firm, and I really, I've really kind of specialized in the capacity measurement. So I've personally done probably 200 capacity measurements. We've done it with everything besides filling five gallon buckets and pouring it in and counting the buckets. You know, we've done the laser level, we've done it with the drone photogrammetry, with lidar drone, with GPS calculating volumetrics in civil 3D cad, and, and a lot of those things I've paid other people to help me on because, you know, you get to a point in your career and you're like, man, I know guys that are so good at this, if I try to do this myself, you know, I'm gonna be giving the client possibly an inferior product, or I'm gonna be I've never charged people for my learning curve. And, and that's where, you know, It's, it's hard To learn Civil 3D when I was like the last class at Oklahoma State University that did manual drafting, and then they started kids on CAD the next year.

Isaac (13:05): Right.

Travis (13:05): So I missed the whole CAD thing. I don't feel like I should be that old .

Isaac (13:10): I got some cad. I definitely did that in school, but then when you get outta school, it's like you have to pick a route. And CAD wasn't my jam. So okay. Up running other programs on top of that, but.

Travis (13:22): Yeah.

Isaac (13:23): Do you have any I guess memorable SPCC plans, some that stick out and something that you're like,

Travis (13:31): Well, I can, I can kind of can tell you some funny ones from the pasture. I mean, I've been on 55 EPA inspections in the pastures of Oklahoma where my work got inspected. A couple of them might have been big, been big sites, but you know, I, out of 55 only had two times that a client got fined, and that was because they just didn't get done what we talked about getting done. And so, you know, when the EPA shows up and you have cattails growing in the water that's inside of your containment, that's supposed to be drained out after every rain. You know, and they're like, well, the dump truck got stuck. I'm like, well, get a different dump truck. You know, like, don't let anything stop you, because on inspection day, if you're not ready, you don't ask grace on an inspection day, that is, you're, you're gonna get turned over to headquarters, they're gonna fine you, and then you're gonna have to still fix it. And then you're gonna have to send photos of what should have been done on the inspection day. Like I've, I've seen lots of bad photos, but if it's all cleaned up before inspection day, that's all that counts. A lot of times. Now, if you had a spill, go out into a river, yeah, okay, you're on the radar, you know, you're gonna have to pay something for that. But I've always tried to make sure that my clients don't get a fine, and I, I'll show up in person as best I can, or I'll be on the phone when the EPAs there. And sometimes if the engineer is available, I've had the EPA say, Hey, if you can get me this little piece of paper that I need by five o'clock today and stamp it, you know, I'll, I'll put that in as being done. And thankfully I've worked with some inspectors that weren't trying to necessarily find people, they just want people to get into compliance. Hmm. But yeah, there are times that you know that you just, it goes real smooth. And there's other times where maybe the client kind of starts smarting off to the EPA and you're just sitting there like

Isaac (15:22): Always,

Travis (15:23): Hey, hey, let me try to talk. This went through for you. Okay. I am not a lawyer, man, ,

Isaac (15:28): And I'm just curious, but are the fines pretty substantial if they're not in compliance? Have you seen what these can be?

Travis (15:37): Yeah. on the small oil field ones, they get a lot of breaks. If you're pumping all out of the ground, you get a lot of breaks when it comes to SPCC. If you're like, say a Lu Bowl site and you're storing drums and big tanks of motor oil and, and everything, you're considered a bolt facility. I've seen some people, I hate to name the state, but you know, they got told they were gonna have to pay like a $275,000 fine for not having containment for their drums and totes inside of a warehouse. And it was a really old warehouse, and they could see daylight through some of the cracks in the wall. But, but the floor was sloped toward an interior drain that was plugged off. And I was able to calculate, you know, we have no rain to compensate for, we're indoors so that sloping concrete could hold the entire tote, all 300 and something gallons. I mean, it's real easy to hold a tote, you know, in a warehouse. But the EPA guy was like, Hey, if that tote were to leak right next to the wall, it could go outside. And I'm thinking, Hey, how many, how many dozens of outdoor drum and tote containment have I seen that just has a roof? It has no wall. It's got a curb around it, it's sloped to the middle, but that doesn't make sense that we have to anticipate that a, a leak's gonna squirt through a hole in the wall. You know, normally that's the big thing. No, no. Berm is designed for an immediate catastrophic release of a tank. Like in the eighties, there was an, the Ashland Tank disaster is a brittle fracture. And the, you know, imagine a 40 foot tall column of liquid in a tank just immediately opens up, it's like a 40 foot tall tsunami ready to go somewhere, pressure, and it, it, it tidal waved over the earth and berm and jumped a two lane highway and landed in the bar ditch on the other side of the road.

Travis (17:21): It, it dented the other tank next door, 20 feet up. It shifted the tank off the foundation. You know, so that's the thing, when, when you start thinking about a spill plan, it's, it's not I've never seen a berm that's designed for an immediate catastrophic release of all the tank contents. I mean and, and I've seen some berms that are like 17 feet tall, made outta cinder blocks, but that was like a hundred years old in Portland. And it was to keep the river out, not to keep the tank contents in, but I can only imagine a brittle fracture would probably just shatter that wall, you know? So I there's kind of, you know, you need to have the capacity, but I usually put a little blurb at the end of my tank table that says, you know, this berms not meant for immediate catastrophic release.

Isaac (18:10): That makes sense.

Travis (18:11): Yeah.

Isaac (18:11): So have you ha, I mean, you've had the opportunity then to, to travel it sounds like, quite a bit mm-hmm . And you've gone to all 42 of the states probably that you're licensed in whatever these jobs are.

Travis (18:22): Yeah, I just finished, I got all 50 about three weeks ago. I'd never been to Montana, even though I've been licensed there for quite a while, you know, since the EPA says your agent can go, I had never been to that particular state, but I've now been to all 50. And yes, I've, you know, I've done this in LA Chicago I've done it in major cities, I've done it in the, the rural pastures.

Isaac (18:48): You've done it all over, so.

Travis (18:50): Yeah.

Isaac (18:50): Sounds like a good cross section of America if you want some.

Travis (18:53): Yeah. Yeah.

Isaac (18:55): Go see the sites. Yeah. so you mentioned you were handed this file cabinet of SPC files. Was this was this something that you grew to like, or did you already know that you kind of liked it? Like, I'm curious, you know, how did this grow into the career path that mm-hmm . You're in right now?

Travis (19:16): Well, you know, I just, I feel like I can, I can I guess it's been repetitive enough that some people might say, this is not even engineering. I can calculate how much this berm can hold. And I would say, you know, you're right. It, it's not rocket science to calculate the capacity, but what I've found is that it doesn't matter if you're a mom and pop company or a Fortune 100 company, I would say 20% of the tanks in America do not have enough berm around them to hold largest tank minus all the displacement tanks plus the rain event. Now, the rain event is its own subject we could talk about, but the EPA has, they've never written it into law. Everybody goes off an industrial assessment of 110%, but they have recommended a 25 year, 24 hour rain event that way you're, you're using local climactic data. So in Phoenix, that's two inches in New Orleans, that's 14 inches of rain. And so if you just use the 110% rule, you know, the same a hundred thousand barrel tank in both places would have the same size berm around it, but you would be like 50,000 gallons too short in, in New Orleans if you just looked. So but yeah, it's, it's something that I grew to kind of like, because I felt like I was looking for a needle in a haystack. I was looking for that low spot, you know, and, and a lot of times the, the low spot is underneath a metal walkway or underneath a pipe rack. It's, it's underneath something where some construction was done and it never quite got brought back to where it was supposed to be. And, and in that regard, you have to be really careful if you're using a drone to do your measurements, because.

Isaac (20:55): Right.

Travis (20:56): I would say 50% of the time the drone finds it and 50% of the time it doesn't. Hmm. And that's part of what I like about using the LIDAR drone is you're, you're flying multiple paths over the site. You may hit the same spot 12 different times, you know, and you're coming in at an angle. And it's, it's pretty phenomenal how often you can see the low spot with the drone. But I've made it kind of my goal to go out and independently measure the top of the burn, maybe with a GPS pole to make sure I find the low spot. But these days people are getting really into the drones, and so I'm being given data, you know, from other people's drone flights and I'm supposed to find the low spots. And the one we did recently in Texas, there were 40 different containment areas, and some of 'em shared, some of them leaked to the outer wall, would've gone off property. And, you know, it's a little bit, it's a change for me to not have personally walked the berm and found the low spot myself. That's, that's just kind of, you know, I'm having to adopt that. You are. Yeah. Yeah.

Isaac (22:06): When and when did you start using drones? Just, you know, kind kind of back up the timeline a little bit because drones are popping up everywhere. I use drones. I got my part 1 0 7 license, but cool.

Travis (22:17): Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

Isaac (22:18): When did you start implementing those and where do you kinda see that technology going?

Travis (22:22): Well, I first used it in 2016, and it was in America's largest tank farm, Cushing, Oklahoma. And, and I was doing it for Phillips 66. And right after that they said, Hey, we're not allowing any drones. They were just not going to allow it. And I said, Hey, what if we have our, you know, what if we have insurance that's as, as expensive as an airplane flying over? 'cause Obviously airplanes fly over all the time. And Cushing in Cushing, you have all these little planes flying in. 'cause They're, they're tracking the pipeline from far distances away, and they fly in over the terminal and you work there for half a day, you're gonna have like multiple flyovers. And so anyway, we, we, we did it in 16, then we had to stop for a while. But, but now I would say kind of the standard is to use the lidar. And what I've seen is that even though GPS has been around forever, and a lot of times I get really good accuracy, I probably get, if I'm holding a GPS pole and I measure the top of a curb and the bottom of a curb and take my tape measure out, I'm getting almost exactly the same result. But nobody will really, they'll, they'll not guarantee that it's, it's like imagine an egg on, its on its end. The, the variability is about the width of an egg on the X and y, and it's about the length of an egg on the vertical. So we're still, in today's world, getting told, I'll give you two inch vertical accuracy if you had me do it with photogrammetry. And, and, but then if you use the la the lidar with the laser, they'll tell you, Hey, I can, I'm probably gonna get you down into a half inch.

Isaac (23:55): Wow.

Travis (23:55): And, and across a huge berm with multiple sharing, you know, being off by an inch and a half would possibly cause you to tell the people they need to raise the berm when they don't need to. And, and that, that would be horrible to cause someone a bunch of money when, when you were act inaccurate in your measurement. So I really like the LIDAR drone. They've come way down in price. Now, if you get, if you get an American made one, it's still maybe gonna cost a quarter of a million for the drone and 60,000 for the laser. But if you, if you can get a DJI you know, drone, you're, you're maybe looking at 60 grand for the whole thing.

Isaac (24:39): And are you using your own equipment or do you contract it out, or both? I imagine your own.

Travis (24:45): I contract it out and, and what I've liked, the one way I got into this, I was starting to do GPS, I bought my own GPS equipment. Eventually I used to rent it because, you know, I'm flying to these other cities and I would just pick it up at a little store and I bought my own. And then I realized I'm not using it that much. So I went to, I've advertised it for sale, and the guy that bought it from Louisiana came up. He's licensed him and his partners in like 10 states, and they own like a million dollars worth of survey equipment. And these guys are super accurate in what they do. I mean, they're, if he's not working for me, he's liable to be aligning Tesla cranes inside of a factory, like six 60 feet tall cranes or something. And these guys are so good at what they do. I'm kind of like, Hey, I'm gonna stay in my lane. I know the EPA law, I, I know the accuracy I want in this calculation. And you come down here and, you know, make sure your drones on coordinate system and, and and we'll work as a team. So

Isaac (25:41): That's All.

Travis (25:41): I'm, I'm usually hiring it out.

Isaac (25:43): I love that. Yeah. It just seems like drones are kind of the bigger age, and I follow along with that too, as we use drones for inspection. So I was just curious how that, you know.

Travis (25:51): Yeah.

Isaac (25:52): Affects the world you in. But.

Travis (25:53): Yeah.

Isaac (25:53): Let's maybe back up to that 1973 EPA oil spill rule. What are some misconceptions that maybe you deal with on a regular basis dealing with that rolling?

Travis (26:04): I would say there's three really big ones. And one is that, and, and the way this came about was in the oil field, you know, you drill a well and you, you don't know how much oil you're gonna get. So they said, we'll give you six months to create a spill plan. Now you have to have the berm around your tanks. If you're gonna have tanks out there, you gotta be compliant with secondary containment. But that kind of bleeds over into, if you make a technical change in the field, you get six months to reflect that in writing in the s spill plan. Well, what happens is people know that, and that's in the back of their mind. And so I tell 'em, Hey, your burn's not big enough. Oh, okay. But I have six months to fix that. Right? He's like, no, no, you're outta compliance right now. And if the EPA came, we're outta compliance. But once you fix it, we get six months to update it in the plan. So it's, it's six months to put in writing.

Isaac (26:59): What you didn't.

Travis (27:01): Yeah. So it's not a grace period, it's just . And then the second thing I mentioned earlier, a lot of people think that the rule is 110%. That can be a very misleading rain calculation because imagine you have one tank sitting in a berm with 60 other tanks, and you say 110% of this one tank is good enough to satisfy the rain for the entire berm. Well, that, that tank is really small compared to that huge berm. If the only time I've really seen it work is if you have a berm, let's say 300 feet by 300 feet berm around a hundred thousand barrel tank, and you're in, go back to Cushing, Oklahoma, and you need a seven inch rain, that 110% of that tank happens to be almost right on the money with how much rain is gonna fall in that area. But as soon as you get into big shared berms, the 110% rule is woefully inaccurate most of the time. There are times in Phoenix or Las Vegas or some other desert place that the, the 25 year, 24 hour rain event that they suggest in their EPA training, again, it's not in the law, it's nowhere in the law that'll actually be overkill compared to 110% of the tank, because the rain value is so small in that area. But most of the time, that's a huge misunderstanding. And then the third one, and I'll stop on this one, is it says in the EPA rule that every five years you're supposed to, as a management team, review your SPCC and you're supposed to sign off. Now, that's in case a new technology has come about that you would want to possibly adopt. But what happens is, and it's probably consultants' fault there, there are people getting brand new s spill plans every five years with a brand new engineering stamp. But that's not what the rule says. And so if you were to never make a technical change in your spill plan ever, you would never need an engineer to stamp it ever again, because administrative changes don't need a stamp. On the other hand, a lot of people, they don't realize that when they change a tank out, that's a technical change be, especially if it's the same size tank as they had before. But in the EPAs mind, the corrosion rate has started over on that tank. Or if you change the contents of the tank, you know, some people might think, well, why do I need a technical amendment if I change the contents? Well, a lot of people are going to biodiesel these days, biodiesel's more corrosive than regular diesel a lot of times. So it's probably good to, you know, have it reviewed and make sure that, that the inspection team knows to address it accordingly going forward. So those are, those are the three big misconceptions that come to my mind when I think about, you know, what I see daily

Isaac (29:45): That I mean, it seems like a challenge to kinda keep up with a lot of that information and helping with clients at the same time. So is this a, a one man show, or do you have other engineers you're working with as part of the company, or is that also contracted out a little bit? Like how, how is that structured for you?

Travis (30:05): I've done a little bit of both. You know, I basically, I mean, I'm pretty close to a one man show, but I've, I've had as many as seven people. I've had as many as just me. When I first got started, it was like financial free fall because, you know, like I said, I'd never done it before and nobody knew my name. I, I just had to pick up the phone and start calling these files in this filing folder. But I I hire, like in Virginia, for example you have to not only verify the capacity, but the structural integrity of the berm. And if it was a tall concrete structure, then, you know, hey, my background's chemical engineering, I can calculate the capacity, but I hire someone else to sign off on the, the structure. And I, I learned so much from structural engineers and civil engineers that, you know, I just worked that into the bid and let them, you know, join in. And that's, that's just kind of how I've handled it. I, I'm starting to market more. I haven't marketed in like eight years and I'm kind of, yeah, I'm, I'm wanting to, if, if all I ever did going forward were technical amendments to the plans, I feel like that would be, that would be where I'd want my sweet spot. And I've even offered it, I'll offer this now on your podcast. You know, if you have a spiel plan and you wanna send it to me for free, I'll have my guy that works for me right now review it with the same checklist that the EPA would use if they were to inspect your site and tell you if you need a technical amendment. And if you do need a technical amendment, you know, then we could work out a project and, and actually do that. But I'll, I'd at least review it for you and tell you if you need one, in my opinion or not.

Isaac (31:49): That sounds great. What's the best way for someone to, to do that? Is there an email or LinkedIn or what's the best way to do that, Travis?

Travis (31:57): Yeah, go to spillplanman.com and there you'll, I'll just go ahead and give you my number. It's on that website too though. 9 1 8 snow fly. It turns out to be a word, snow fly or nine lines 8 7 6 6 9 3 5 9. And, and it's spillplanman.com. I I, I've only gotten one job, literally one job off the internet out of 1400 jobs, and so I don't like maintain the, the best fanciest website, you know, but yeah,

Isaac (32:34): Word of mouth, It's broken.

Travis (32:36): Yeah.

Isaac (32:38): Well, we'll definitely blast that out. We'll make sure you try to get some exposure. We'll leave links underneath any video that we post as well. We're excited about sharing what you do. And it sounds like you're, you are a subject matter expert on this SPCC topic, so let's let's blast it out there. Well,

Travis (32:58): Thank you.

Isaac (32:59): Yeah, that's thank you.

Travis (33:01): I Appreciate what you guys are doing. Uwhen I took the, I told you offline, you know, that I originally wanted to be a civil engineer, I thought, and then I, I went down the chemical road and,when I passed the PE after being out of college for 12 years, I used,some study materials that I just felt like really helped me. And,and I, I wonder if someday, you know, I'll ever feel like I should go back and, and take the civil, but, but at this point it's like my phone is so Full.

Isaac (33:28): Environmental.

Travis (33:29): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my phone is so full of phone numbers of guys that know more than I'll ever know in my whole career that I'm like, , why wouldn't I just call this guy? You know? It just, it doesn't seem like, but, but really great service you have going, I'm glad people are getting to get their confidence up to, to take that test. And one thing, I don't know if the way the computer base one works like it did when I took it and it was paper, but you know, if you're, if you're on a problem that you're stumped or five in a row that you're stumped on, I just encourage people, Hey, skip 'om and go do all the ones you can do and then come back around to those, you know, and sit there and chew on 'em after you've got all the hay in the barn. As one of my teachers used to say, get all the, get all the hay bills you can in, and then go work on those few that you're struggling with. You know,

Isaac (34:17): That's a good analogy. That's probably a good point. Is there any piece of advice you'd give to young engineers either want wanting to make an impact on their life or just, you know, trying to figure out their own career and.

Travis (34:31): Yeah.

Isaac (34:31): What they wanna do in their life?

Travis (34:33): Well, what, what helped me so much was what I alluded to earlier, I was a chemical engineer and I went to a chemical plant. If I'd have been a chemical engineer at Intel, I wouldn't have been offered to go into marketing. I wouldn't have been offered a lot of latitude. But, you know, if you're, if you go to a company for your first job that really values the very major that you have, I think you'll have a lot of latitude and you'll be able to find kind of your place in the world. And you know, it, it's okay to go after something that you feel like has a natural born talent for you. Mine was, I was very comfortable presenting and going and talking to clients who people I never met. But I, I think that, that, that's a key thing. But once you're in a job, I tell my kids this all the time. I'm like, you have to have two things. You have to produce and you have to get along with people. Now, you, if you're the, if you're the most likable guy, but you don't hardly get anything done, or you're the guy that can do everything, work circles around people, but nobody wants to deal with you, either one of those imbalances in a, in a layoff in the future will probably catch you. But if you can, if you can try to get things done and get along with people, you know, and it's some of the things you've put on LinkedIn, it's the communication skills, it's the follow up, it's being punctual, you know, it's, it's those different things. Then if you can keep a balance of those things, you don't have to be the smartest, and you don't have to be like a, a genius public speaker. It doesn't matter that you're a little bit shy. It, you know, it's gonna work out. Just keep a balance of, of getting things done and getting along with people.

Isaac (36:08): Perfect. I think that's great advice, . I'll take that into my own life and pass on the kids.

Travis (36:15): I hope I can follow .

Isaac (36:18): Well, Travis, thank you for jumping on and sharing your wisdom with us. Appreciate you doing this podcast with me today.

Travis (36:23): Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Isaac (36:26): All right, we'll talk to you later.

Travis (36:27): Okay, bye-Bye.