Environment
We take pride in our environmental performance and our commitment to protecting the environment. All Surerus employees are stewards of the environment, and we hold each staff member and subcontractor accountable for its protection so that, together, we will continue to be the industry leader in environmental excellence.
Environmental Team
Our Environmental Team personnel are integral to our early project planning phases and, once in the field, are usually the first to arrive and the last to leave a project site. The team coordinates relevant activities and ensures environmental compliance with project-specific plans, regulations and best management practices. They ensure mitigation strategies are implemented and that field staff are aware of any environmental risks associated with daily activities. All construction personnel participate in a pre-phase meeting to identify environmentally sensitive features, avoidance and mitigation measures, location of spill response equipment and review any site-specific environmental plans. Environmental issues and any necessary mitigation strategies are relayed to site-specific workers at the daily tailgate meeting so that they may be deployed successfully in the field.
Highlights
- We have consistently scored extremely high during the environmental components of National Energy Board audits, including 100% scores on successive projects.
- We developed our own Clubroot cleaning protocol that was highly effective by ensuring equipment cleaning protocols were followed and documented. In fact, parts of our system have been incorporated into owner company procedures.
- Surerus’ workplace culture is highly receptive to spill prevention, clean-up and reporting. We believe our compliance to spill reporting and clean-up is by far the best in the industry; even spills of several drops are cleaned up, documented, and reported.
- We maintain a fleet of spill response trailers and spill response personnel on site during our projects to ensure prompt and effective containment, clean-up and management in the event of a larger scale spill.
- We’ve been involved in several highly successful minimal disturbance projects. During winter conditions, the work area of the right-of-way is frost packed and flooded with water to create an ice and snow surface above the undisturbed understory. Only the ditch line and a few areas of the right-of-way with steep inclines are disturbed during construction, with the steep grade cuts being replaced during clean-up. As the roots and seed banks remain undisturbed throughout construction the result is healthy vegetation over the vast majority of the pipeline right-of-way the following summer.
- During winter 2014/2015 we had very good success with very minimal disturbance within a forested area to run our temporary hydrostatic fill line. With very minimal clearing and no line of sight issues, our hydrostatic test hard line was threaded through a forest with the resultant clearing barely identifiable from the aircraft the following summer during pipeline aerial reconnaissance flights.
- Our environmental team works well with owner company environmental representatives.
- General housekeeping during construction is very good, and general clean-up is highly commended by owner companies (best seen to date).
- Our supervisors have a high level of environmental awareness and involve our environmental coordinators in work planning decisions.
- Wetland restorations have been highly successful.
