Escambia County Waste Services Gives Hands-On Experience to UWF Science Students

Escambia County Waste Services hosted a University of West Florida hydrology class last week at the Perdido Landfill, giving students valuable hands-on experience with water quality testing in the field.

Students from the UWF Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences visited one of the Perdido Landfill’s monitoring wells to observe and participate in routine water quality sampling, which provides a variety of information that may be used in future groundwater monitoring plans.

Professor Matthew Schwartz said the experience was beneficial for his hydrology lab students, especially because it can be difficult to access active monitoring wells to help teach students how to collect and calculate groundwater data outside of the classroom.

“It’s amazing,” Schwartz said. “Just to be able to get out into the field as opposed to just looking at things in the lab is hugely valuable, but to be able to actually get out to a working site and interact with people whose job, in part, is to do these kinds of activities, is highlighting for them what’s next, the sort of work that they might be doing. So it’s important for the technical aspects of the work, but it’s also important for the students’ own workforce and professional development.”

Escambia County’s Perdido Landfill has numerous groundwater monitoring wells that are routinely tested to ensure compliance with various state and federal environmental regulations, including 11 newly installed wells that are currently being tested to gather baseline groundwater data.

“They originally wanted to come out just to do the depth of water, but lucky for them, we're right in the middle of these activities, so this is kind of an icing on the cake with a cherry on top,” said Nic Howard, Escambia County Waste Services Engineering and Environmental Quality Manager. “Because not only are they getting to do depth of water, but they got to see a low flow sampling, in addition to the slug testing, or hydraulic conductivity testing.”

UWF student Kacey Larsen, a senior studying environmental management, said she enjoyed getting out of the classroom and learning about the testing process in the field. Larsen said she’s specifically interested in natural resources management and is considering looking into consulting work after graduation.

“It’s cool to learn about all the slug testing,” Larsen said. “Just to get real-world experience, you can see what a potential day of the life of working in this job would look like. Also, seeing these tools that we’ve seen in the lab put to use in the field is really interesting.”

Escambia County staff and the project consultant, Geosyntec, will continue conducting water quality testing and sampling on all 11 wells, which will provide a better understanding of the aquifer and how the groundwater is moving.

“Ultimately, those different tests are used as you move further into any kind of groundwater monitoring plan,” Howard said. “After you develop all the wells, you come in and you do a round of water levels and then you do a round of water quality sampling. It’s a pretty robust suite of analytics that they're sampling for to give us baseline analysis of what the groundwater is doing. So it all goes into developing your overall groundwater monitoring plan.”

To learn more about Escambia County Waste Services and the Perdido Landfill, visit MyEscambia.com/wasteservices.