Camarillo Waste Firm to Aid Red River Cleanup

It will take weeks or longer for residents of North Dakota’s Red River Valley region to recover from recent flooding. But a Camarillo company will do what it can to ease the process.

MSE Environmental Inc., an 11-year-old environmental consulting and hazardous waste management firm, has been hired by the North Dakota Department of Agriculture to help clean up the flooded areas.

A crew is scheduled to begin the work in mid-May.

“We’ll be removing material from households that were flooded, removing pesticides on farms that got damaged by the waters,” said Frank Doerfler, president of MSE. “We’ll send a crew up there to go around to different communities, package material and transport it.”

The flood-cleanup job, which the company received as part of an ongoing contract with the state, follows MSE’s signing of a five-year hazardous materials management contract with the University of California system. MSE was selected as one of four firms to help with full-service management at participating schools.

“It will be packaging, transportation and disposal of hazardous waste from experimental labs--we’re not sure yet what part of it we’ll be doing for them,” Doerfler said. “It’s a big foot in the door to doing a lot of work for the universities.”

The new contracts come at a good time for MSE. The company recently lost its bid to serve as Ventura County’s permanent facility for special one-day collections of household hazardous waste. MSE is in the process of adding 15,000 square feet of office and warehouse space and had proposed that one-third of that be available for the annual public waste roundups.

As a small company--with 25 full-time and 50 part-time employees--MSE and others of similar size tend to be overlooked in favor of larger waste management operations, Doerfler said. He said he expects the two new contracts to improve the perception that all small companies are risky propositions.

“It’s very competitive and getting harder and harder for small companies to survive because of the misconception of liability,” he said. “It keeps getting worse because there have been a lot of small companies in this business that have not handled waste in a sound manner and have used questionable facilities.

“I hope this will help,” he said. “This little-bitty company in California doing big programs throughout the United States says a lot about what a little company can offer.”

MSE also has multiyear contracts with the states of Pennsylvania, Nevada and Montana.