Internship Summary. The Environmental Field Training Internship, called the MINS Internship Program and the McClellan AFB Internship by the Navy and the Air Force, respectively, provided hazardous waste management; site remediation; safety, health, and environmental compliance; or pollution prevention training to displaced or soon-to-be displaced civilian naval workers from Mare Island Naval Station (MINS) as part of the US Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). These workers received hands-on training in McClellan Air Force Base (McAFB) Environmental Management (EM) Directorate’s living laboratory and with EM management and technical staff. To be eligible, all candidate workers must have received fifteen college credit hours of classroom instruction by the University of California, Davis, University Extension (UNEX) in areas such as project management systems, remedial technologies, health and safety, and hazardous waste management.
Selected six-person teams, consisting of four tradespersons and two engineers were assigned to either the McAFB Environmental Management Restoration (EMR) division or the Environmental Management Pollution Prevention (EMP) division of EM. The interns were exposed to one or more of the following areas: project management, well drilling, underground storage tank excavation and tank removal, remedial investigation, feasibility study, remedial design, remedial action, ecological and health-based risk assessment, health and safety compliance, hazardous materials handling, asbestos abatement, lead abatement, PCB abatement, risk communication and public relations, and management of the Administrative Record.
Interns were eligible to receive additional classroom training at McAFB in General Awareness Hazardous Waste Training, Operational Knowledge Hazardous Waste Training, and or Expert Proficiency Hazardous Waste Training.
Internship Objective. The Environmental Field Training Internship was created for UNEX to retrain displaced or soon-to-be displaced federal workers stationed at MINS in Vallejo, CA. The objective of the internship was to retrain the civilian naval employees from former cold war activities to new skills in environmental management and remediation by offering appropriate on-the-job training and programs at the Environmental Management Directorate (EM) of McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, CA. UC Davis was tasked by the US Department of Defense to formulate the internship program.
Internship goals were:
- development of the administrative structure
- identification of specific priority areas for training
- assembly of personality and professional profiles to identify potentially successful candidates
- codevelopment, with the Navy, of the application process and internship advertisement
- establishment of an outline for an intern’s final report
