Stretching across 580 square miles in southeastern Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s Hanford Site is home to natural resources like gravel rock and sand — essential materials for the site's ongoing construction and remediation efforts.
Office of Environmental Management
October 22, 2024
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An aerial view of mounds of gravel and sand currently stored inside a borrow pit on the Hanford Site. The material will be used for construction and remediation projects around the site.
RICHLAND, Wash. — Stretching across 580 square miles in southeastern Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s Hanford Site is home to natural resources like gravel rock and sand — essential materials for the site's ongoing construction and remediation efforts.
The Land Management team with Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS) manages these resources. There are six onsite borrow pits that store gravel, sand, topsoil and other rock that have been “recycled” from onsite projects.
“Remediation is a key part of the Hanford mission, and our teams are doing a great job of managing the limited resources we have available here at Hanford,” shared Tashina Jasso, with EM’s Site Stewardship Division at Hanford. “By repurposing these materials, we’re able to better support new and ongoing projects.”
Crews with Hanford Site contractor Hanford Mission Integration Solutions use front-end loaders inside one of Hanford’s borrow pits to load material for an onsite construction project.
The Land Management team uses the Hanford Stewardship Information System to catalog the type of resources available and where they are located within the pits. They review and approve requests from contractors to extract materials when needed.
In addition to the electronic database, the team collaborates with other groups and employs advanced technology to manage resources. For the past few years, they've been using drones to gather data on the pits.
“The HMIS Unmanned Aircraft Systems team is helping us measure the volume of the pits,” said Aaron Lambert, a project manager with the Land Management team. “We’re using a drone and mapping tools to estimate the sizes of the pits and how much material remains in each.”
This summer alone, more than 10,000 cubic yards — equal to about 100 swimming pools — of clean material were added to the borrow pits. The new supply came from recent construction projects at Hanford’s Effluent Treatment Facility and Central Plateau Water Treatment Facility.
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