Prairie State Generating Company’s environmental intern, Hannah Dhom, has spent her summer making sure that PSGC remains compliant in its new and continuing projects around the campus.
Dhom’s summer has been busy and hands on. From ground water sampling to overseeing the construction of cell four with the coal combustion residuals group at the Near Field Site she has gone through a diverse environmental compliance experience. She has also worked with biologists at the stream relocation project at the Near Field site to ensure that a wild life restoration project is up to par with Illinois Environmental Protection Agency standards.
“Environmental Director, Jim Andrew, wanted me to get a really good overview of everything that an environmental department does, and I think I have,” she said. “There are several different aspects the department oversees ranging from air, water, waste management and mine compliance.”
She said the most interesting aspect of her job has been testing stack emissions after it has gone through all of the environmental control systems before it is released into the atmosphere.
While in the office, Dhom would take the data she gathered while doing air and water sampling and enter into programs to see how well Prairie State is doing against environmental standards, giving her the opportunity to observe the whole process of environmental compliance from Prairie State’s perspective.
This has been Dhom’s third internship. Prairie State has offered Dhom the best opportunity she has had from any of them to put what she has learned at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale in her environmental engineering classes to practice.
“The environment here has been so different from my past experiences. I never had the chance to work at a facility of this scale, so everything here is bigger and done at a higher level,” she said.
After her internships ends, Dhom will return to SIU – Carbondale for her final year of college.