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Jim Okun remembers a much different era for environmental protection, only a few decades ago.
"If you think back," he said, "people used to dump stuff in the Connecticut River without a permit, like it was no big deal. Now, people say, 'why, that's terrible.'
"We see this in the environmental field in general," said Okun, one of the three founders and principals of O'Reilly, Talbot & Okun Associates (OTO), a full-service environmental, safety, health, and geotechnical firm based in Springfield. "Issues get hot and stay hot for awhile, but eventually they just become part of the way people do business.
"Over the past 10 years, we've seen a similar thing with underground fuel tanks," he continued. "Now, they have double walls, cathodic protection, and built-in testing equipment to find out if anything is leaking. They didn't have that 30 years ago."
In other words, it's a different era in environmental services, one that poses plenty of complexity and challenge, but also two decades of opportunity for a firm that began in the second floor of Mike Talbot's house in 1993.
Opportunity, after all, is the very foundation of the business. Before Okun, Talbot, and Kevin O'Reilly launched their venture, they were working together at an environmental-services firm in Connecticut.
"Massachusetts had just developed the Mass. Contingency Plan, or MCP, which is a law that tells people how to go about cleaning up spills of hazardous materials," Okun explained. "As Massachusetts started to roll out that program, we saw that creating a big need for people with our skills. We all lived in Massachusetts or close to the state line, and we thought, 'wow, this is a great opportunity for us to use our skills to help people implement these new regulations.' And that prompted us to start this company."
Back in the early days, it was a garage operation, Okun said - well, a second-floor operation, anyway - but it quickly grew; today, the firm employs six Massachusetts licensed site professionals, three Connecticut licensed environmental professionals, four Massachusetts registered professional engineers, a certified industrial hygienist, and a certified safety professional.
That staff offers a wide range of skills in what has become a very broad job description for OTO, its main focus being...