As Bob Bradley spotted a funnel cloud snaking down from the black clouds over Bridgeport in June, he knew it was shaping up to be a bad day just across the bridge in Stratford at York Analytical Laboratories Inc.
“I knew we had issues,” said Bradley, managing director of York.
Any loss of power can have an exponential effect on the lab”™s delicate machines, which can take a full day to come back online. In the extended power outage that hit the Bridgeport area following the tornado, York”™s staff worked deep into the night to get its instruments back online to resume the flow of sample tests.
Despite the path torn by the recession through the environmental industry, which is dependent in part on construction, York has hunkered down and seen its business remain mostly steady due to its diverse array of testing services.
“A few years ago, it might have been a new hotel going up here, a new building there,” said Michael Beckerich, vice president of sales and marketing, comparing the company”™s business today to that at the height of the last economic cycle. “But we are still making 20 pickups (of test samples) a day, and there are days where we might have 40.”
Beckerich coordinates the dispatch of those trucks daily from Stratford; some of them taking the Bridgeport ferry to Long Island, N.Y.; others heading to New York City, where it recently analyzed soil from the site of the old Yankee Stadium; and still more journeying to upstate New York to pick up samples and drop off collection kits.
Those kits include vacuum canisters that draw air from various buildings and sites for testing at York”™s Stratford lab. The company traces its heritage to air testing ”“ it was spun out 20 years ago from a predecessor company that analyzed emissions from smokestacks.
Computers make testing more accurate
It is a different business today ”“ most visibly in the use of machines from PerkinElmer and other companies that analyze material and feed data directly to computers. When York was just starting out, chemists relied mostly on gauges to determine contaminant levels in varying materials.
“The eyes were involved, the hands were involved ”“ there was a huge capacity for error,” Bradley said.
Chemists like Bradley still run the labs but increasingly the employees they manage are more versed in computers rather than chemistry.
Environmental testing remains a fragmented industry, with a few larger players nationally but more typically smaller companies like York focusing on local markets; and several local municipalities and utilities maintain their own labs as well.
Environmental regulations getting tighter
Environmental regulations continue to stiffen in Connecticut despite pressure from Gov. M. Jodi Rell for the state Department of Environmental Protection to ease up on red tape, according to Eric Brown, an associate counsel with the Connecticut Business & Industry Association who tracks the sector. In the past eight months, Brown noted, DEP has held hearings on 500 new or revised water quality standards; has expanded so-called stream-flow regulations that will impact the cost of water; and is issuing new regulations on spills that CBIA thinks will flood DEP with thousands or reports of minor spills that pose no measurable risk to the environment.
In addition to some national companies with locations in Fairfield County ”“ such as TestAmerica in Shelton ”“ Fairfield County is home to several more environmental test labs of varying capacities, including:
Ӣ AMC Environmental L.L.C., Stratford;
Ӣ Aqua Environmental Lab, Newtown;
Ӣ Brooks Environmental Consulting L.L.C., Norwalk;
Ӣ Complete Environmental Testing Inc., Stratford;
Ӣ Environmental Laboratory of Fairfield, Fairfield;
Ӣ Environmental Management Geological Consultants Inc., Shelton;
”¢ Hygenix Inc., Stamford; and  Â
Ӣ JMS Environmental Services Inc., Danbury.
So, with the increasing environmental regulations and as the construction industry rebuilds, environmental testing companies hope the worst of the economic havoc is behind them. At environmental services provider TRC Companies Inc., once based in Windsor but now located in Lowell, Mass., gross revenue plunged 24 percent to $331 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, on the heels of a restructuring completed in 2009. Since then, however, TRC said it has begun to see capital expenditures increase in its environmental remediation business; particularly from schools that are assessing exposure to PCBs.
“We”™ve had to battle the myriad of failures in the U.S. economy; from the real estate market collapse, to the lack of capital expenditures of all segments of the economy ”¦ and the billions of budget deficits affecting the many states and municipalities we work for,” said Chris Vincze, CEO of TRC, in a conference call with investment analysts last month. “We believe the worst is over, judging from the trends.”
