Another Day at the Office: Tom Speight ’00 poses next to a 14,000-gallon gas tank that had been forgotten since the 1960s.
Recently, History alum Tom Speight ’00 got in touch with Professor Pajakowski. The History Department learned that Speight is now an analyst with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. How did he land a job in that field, and how does he use the skills he acquired as a History major? Read on as Speight explains his work!
A few years after graduation, I took an opportunity to go into the environmental field for what was supposed to be a temporary position and, somewhat to my own surprise, made a career of it. My main specialty is the investigation and cleanup of contaminated properties, a field which involves elements of geology, chemistry, toxicology, civil engineering . . . and, yes, history.
Most of my work for the first couple of years consisted of “Phase I” projects, which are due-diligence reports done as part of real estate transactions. Since a large component of a Phase I report was researching a site’s historic use, to learn whether it had been a dry cleaner, gas station, mill, landfill, foundry, or shipyard, this was a pretty good fit and also gave me the opportunity to pick up other skills that led me into first working on cleanup projects and then running the projects myself. After fifteen years working for consulting engineering companies, I joined the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection in 2019. Most of my work there involves the investigation, closure, and reuse of landfills (they make great solar farms), plus large recycling projects and assisting cities and towns with waste management. What’s usually the quickest way to locate an abandoned landfill? That’s right, historical research. It’s not the easiest or most typical career path, but it can be done.
Some of the ways a major in history prepared me for this work included:
- documentary research methods
- experience in quickly taking in, organizing, and understanding large amounts of information
- writing quickly, concisely, and well—the importance of this can’t be overemphasized in any knowledge-based profession
- knowledge of history, both in a factual sense and as a process
There is plenty of room in the environmental field and related disciplines for this kind of “applied history,” and there are firms of consulting historians, archivists, and historic preservation experts who specialize in this kind of work as part of “brownfields” and other public works projects. For example, one former colleague of mine was responsible for compiling a detailed history tracing approximately two hundred years’ worth of industrial uses for the entire neighborhood surrounding the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY (which is now a Superfund site). This was done for two purposes; the first was to identify potential “hot spots” of contamination, such as forgotten former oil storage depots, and the second was to identify parties who could be held responsible for the cleanup work.
In 2018, I published a book (Manufactured Gas Plant Remediation: A Case Study, Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1084 pages) that I coauthored with a legendary consulting engineer and geologist, Allen Hatheway, on the history and environmental legacy of manufactured gas plants (sometimes called “gasworks” or “MGPs”). The Geological Society of America awarded our book the 2021 Burwell Award for outstanding publication in the field of engineering geology.
The first half of our book discusses the origins, equipment, operations, and business management of the gas industry as it evolved over approximately 150 years. We presented the state of Massachusetts’ gas industry as a case study (in fact, the first state-level case study anyone has done). Most of the references we used for the historical components of the book were original publications by the gas industry, such as professional journals and gasworks operations manuals, which we used to describe the industry in its own words. Some of these dated back to the 1820s. We also used historic maps and other records to locate and map approximately 170 gasworks, waste dumps, and other relevant sites, including a number that hadn’t been discovered yet, and compiled short historical summaries of each site. The second half of the book addresses technical issues such as chemical hazards, environmental regulations, and strategies for cleaning sites up for beneficial use.
For me, this was the perfect intersection of environmental work and history, because some (ok, most) environmental problems need to be put in a human context in order to figure out why something happened. The laws of physics might dictate how dissolved gasoline migrates through groundwater, but loading hazardous waste into a four-horse wagon or dump truck and driving it to the other side of town to be dumped and buried is a human action.
Why Gasworks Mattered In Urban and Industrial Development
Gasworks were industrial facilities operated by gas companies, which distilled coal to produce flammable gas, which was used for illumination (the “gas lights” of the 19th century), heating buildings, and to fuel industries for over a century, much as we use natural gas today. Virtually any city or town of size in the early 1900s had a gasworks, and larger cities often had more than one. Boston, for example, had eight gasworks, and in fact had gas service before it had municipal water service. Gas companies were an important factor in urban development worldwide during the 19th century, as the gas supply literally fueled economic development by enabling the founding of other local businesses and industries which relied on gas, and gas lighting for streets and gas services to homes helped make a town attractive to residents. The gas industry also inspired developments in engineering, business, and even law—most of the regulatory system we currently use for utilities and telecommunications was originally developed partly to regulate gas companies.
Unfortunately, while they were useful, gasworks were not pleasant places. They ran day and night, were noisy, filthy, foul-smelling, and had an unnerving potential to explode, so gasworks were usually confined to industrial areas or low-income neighborhoods on the “wrong side of the tracks.” The Springfield, MA, gasworks partly inspired the polluting Thneed factory from Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.
The Springfield, MA Gas Light Company gasworks in the 1930s.
Making gas out of coal also generated large quantities of byproducts which provided the starting point for most of the modern chemical industry, including coke, a smokeless fuel and an essential ingredient in steelmaking, plus ammonium sulfate (a valuable fertilizer) and coal tar, which could be distilled into an amazing variety of chemicals, including creosote for preserving wood, laboratory solvents and reagents, dyes for paper and cloth (notably the “Prussian blue” pigment used in old blueprints), and pharmaceuticals. For everyone who’s seen the movie A Christmas Story, the infamous foul-tasting red soap is made with carbolic acid, a.k.a. phenol, a coal tar derivative and widely-used disinfectant.
Why Gasworks Matter Now
The manufactured gas industry largely shut down in the United States during the 1950s, as pipelines for distributing natural gas became feasible and gas companies switched over. Most of the gasworks were demolished and the properties redeveloped for utility, industrial, or even residential use during the 1960s and 1970s. There’s an ongoing campaign to save one of the few remaining gasworks buildings in New England at the former Concord gasworks. Some of the sites that became residences helped draw attention federal and state environmental agencies’ attention to gasworks during the early 1980s, including the notorious Costa’s Dump site in Lowell, MA, where a housing complex was built on a dump site of cyanide-containing waste.
Unfortunately, most of the gas industry’s byproducts were toxic, carcinogenic or otherwise unpleasant, and gasmaking was a messy process, so gasworks operations typically created significant long-term environmental problems, including pollution of lakes and rivers, contamination of drinking water sources, contamination of soil, and off-gassing volatile compounds such as benzene (a carcinogen) into nearby buildings. State and federal laws passed after the early 1980s required the utility companies whose corporate ancestors had operated the gasworks to take responsibility for the work to address risks these sites posed to human and environmental health.
Many of the formerly wrong-side-of-the-tracks gasworks properties are now potentially valuable urban real estate, for example the Genzyme building in Cambridge, MA (formerly the Cambridge Gas Light Company), or the “Edison on the Charles” apartment complex in Waltham, MA. Given the environmental problems associated with former gasworks, however, redevelopment of these properties involves extensive remediation work to protect human health and the environment.
The Manchester, NH, gasworks, from an 1897 fire insurance map.
As a case in point (and to tie in with St A’s “A River Runs Through Us” program) Manchester’s main gasworks was located on Gas Street, close to the bank of the Merrimack River. This plant supplied the Queen City’s light, heat, and power needs from 1852 to 1952, when the city’s gas system was converted to natural gas. Coal tar discharges from the plant’s wastewater during this period contaminated the river. Cleanup work included dredging nine thousand cubic yards of coal tar-contaminated sediment from the riverbed in 2007 (enough to cover the Grappone football field in a layer of tarry muck five feet deep) plus excavating another several thousand yards of contaminated soil from the gasworks site itself. Other remedial work is still going on.
So, that’s where I am, and that’s how I got here. I hope you found it interesting. I certainly did.
One Thing after Another 