Soil pollution monitoring

OTEK Australia has combined two contaminated land assessment technologies for the environmental sector. The combination of Direct Sensing Tools and an EnCore sampler increases the reliability of analytical results and enables contamination data to be processed in real time, making the process faster than previous approaches.

The tools provide reliable information that is particularly important when developing industrial or contaminated land, especially for residential developments and resource sector projects. The costs of using the new technologies is claimed to be lower than traditional methods and can provide greater long-term benefits and certainty around the clean-up activity that is required.

The tools include a soil conductivity/membrane interface probe, an ultraviolet optical screening tool and a hydraulic profiling tool. With the help of the professional team at South Western Drilling, the tools are pushed into the ground where they collect detailed information on chemicals that have leaked into the land.

The data collected is then analysed by a sophisticated computer set-up and then interpreted by OTEK consultants to deliver a rapid, accurate picture of contamination. The typical techniques currently used in Australia provide only 25-100 data points to analyse per day whereas this new technology results in 9000-18,000 data points, which increases the reliability of results.