Ami Adini

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 2, 1943, Ami Adini (full given name “Amiram”) is an environmentalist and engineer regarded as a pioneer in the environmental field for his original work toward the establishment of standards for Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (see Ami Adini & Associates, Inc.) and his efforts resulting in the passage of the only California Legislative Bill in 2011 which met the required 2/3rds vote for bills that collect fees (AB291). The bill, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, provided an additional $180 million to the fund over a 2 year period and was [http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=17269 signed into Law by California Governor Edmund G. (“Jerry”) Brown on October 8th, 2011], allowing petroleum cleanup to continue full swing.
As a Founding Board Member and Vice President of the non-profit CORE Environmental Foundation, Inc. (a group established for Consultants, Owners, Regulators and Enviro-vendors), Ami has been an active contributor of power, time and professional resources in the multi-disciplinary effort to rescue the California Underground Storage Tank (UST) Fund, which was established as a financial mechanism for the cleanup of soils and groundwater contaminated from leaking petroleum storage tanks throughout the state. It was from his position as a member of CORE’s political arm, CORE Environmental Reform, that Ami exerted extensive effort toward the passage of the 2011 Bill, AB291, which was a key support for the state UST Fund.
Adini studied mechanical, nuclear and chemical engineering and received his mechanical engineering degree from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in 1964. In 1977 he immigrated to the United States where he expanded his engineering credentials, and in 1987 he opened his own company for the remediation and cleanup of brownfields and leaking UST sites, which by 1989 was incorporated in the State of California as Ami Adini & Associates, Inc.
Ten years later (March 2007) Adini went to Tel Aviv and provided the solutions being implemented in California to the Israeli Water Association, the Israeli regulatory universe and the Israeli media. The year following (April 2008), sponsored by a Fulbright Specialists Grant through fellow environmentalist and geologist, Jim Jacobs of Richmond, California, Adini and colleagues, Dr. Ravi Arulanantham, Dr. Chin Man Mok, and Professor Jacobs delivered a 5 day environmental workshop to officials of the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Quality, the Israeli Military, oil industry representatives, real estate developers, environmental service providers and consultants, who represented the then-burgeoning environmental program for the country.
Adini has held the position of President and CEO of Ami Adini & Associates, Inc. since its inception in 1987. In this time, the company has been engaged in projects covering the various phases of assessment and remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater, removal of over- and underground petroleum storage tanks and construction of double-wall underground storage tank systems. Adini has also appeared as an expert witness for a number of related court cases, and has been seen doing lectures and educational seminars to attorney associations, real-estate associations and firms and municipalities.
Adini’s licenses and professional registrations in California:
• California Environmental Protection Agency, Registered Environmental Assessor Level II #20244 (Exp)
• National Registry of Environmental Professionals, Environmental Professional #2614
• California Contractors State License Board, General Contractor #587540 - Classifications: Engineering/Building/Hazardous Waste
Early life
Ami Adini was born in the middle of World War II when Nazis were exterminating Jews in Europe. His given name, Amiram, carries the meaning “my people are elevated” and was meant to inspire hope of better future to a nation under the risk of elimination. His father, born Israel Hirsch Eidles in Kielce, Poland, immigrated to Israel (then Palestine) in 1935, leaving behind parents and six siblings who were later exterminated by Nazis. In Israel he changed his name to Israel Zvi Adini and worked as an administrator in a medical insurance company while also serving as a board member of a community synagogue for over 20 years running a charity program.
Adini’s mother, Leah Lichtenberg, was born in 1911 in Zuromin, Poland. She immigrated to Israel (then Palestine) and married Adini’s father in 1936. She was later to become an Honorary Citizen of Tel Aviv and served as an international board member to the Israeli National Religious Party and head of a teachers seminary. Her parents remained in Poland and were exterminated by Nazis during WWII.
Adini has a single sibling born in 1937, Dr. Uziel (“Uzi”) Adini, Professor of Jewish Education. Noted as one of the most influential in North America, Uzi served as a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, became the Director of the Jewish Community High School of Gratz College and professor for 23 years, promoted to Vice President of the College, retired, and continues teaching as Professor Emeritus.
Beyond being born during WWII, Ami Adini’s early years were spent living in and around war and terrorism on the outskirts of Tel Aviv where the farmlands were evolving rapidly into urban areas and sirens and bombings sent the family to shelters during two wars through his childhood. Adini’s youth included field games and rowing boats along the Yarkon River and the sea.
Adini received extensive schooling in orthodox Jewish religious studies, learning the Torah and Talmud in a seminary-like setting. His first teachers imbued Adini with a German accent because they were German Jews who fled the country in the early 1930s with the rise of the Nazis, the undertones of this accent can still be heard in his speech today. At the age of 13, he was exposed to Shakespeare’s play "The Tragedy of Julius Cesar" and became so enamored with it that he memorized all of the first three acts. By the time he was eight, Adini had read dozens of books and two full encyclopedias which had been given to his elder brother.
Stories told Adini by his relatives of their own horrors of concentration camps and losing family yet surviving Nazi terrorism gave him a profound appreciation and humility for life and persistence against all odds.<ref name="Zuromin Memorial Book The Holocaust Remembered (Poland)" /> Fundamental lessons learned through the period included tolerance and friendship being the foundation of human affairs.
Adini’s higher education was in engineering, specifically mechanical, chemical and nuclear. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and went on for an additional 22 credits toward Master of Science. The first two decades of his career were devoted to the design and construction of nuclear power plant facilities and a significant number of other plants, including a chlorine manufacturing plant, a utility plant for a university campus, polyester plant, desulfurization plants for a coal-fired power plant, potash plant, boric and generated what is today the nationwide standard. This pioneering work produced hundreds of reports for Texaco USA and City of Anaheim combined.
In another pioneering move begun in 2007, it started promoting the concept of performance-based remediation, first through a refueling station site in East Los Angeles and currently at an historic oil refinery in Signal Hill, California. Initiated and directed toward the California UST Cleanup Fund’s need for successful performance based cleanup, the concept has established a functional standard allowing cases to be brought to regulatory closure with guaranteed price and time.
Adini’s company is also noted for use of the patented process of Subsurface Metabollic Enhancement or SME (US patent 6,464,005), which converts contaminated groundwater to drinking water quality over periods of 6 to 24 months without significant disturbance of the land. More specifically, SME is a method of in-place cultivation of native organisms for underground bio-removal of hydrocarbon and chlorinated solvent contamination, converting the hydrocarbons into non-toxic water and carbon dioxide. Owned by Pure Enviro Management of Orem, Utah, SME is licensed to Ami Adini & Associates, Inc. for implementation in California.
Company Functions
Functions of the company include environmental engineering, design and construction. Services include environmental permits and planning, Phase I and Phase II site assessments, environmental audits, spill prevention and contingency planning, groundwater monitoring, remedial investigations and feasibility studies, hydro-geologic testing, soil and groundwater remedial action design and implementation, underground or above-ground storage tank system operation and maintenance services or removal/replacement, expert witness services and brownfield site development.
Company History and Pioneering in the Environmental Field
The company was founded in California by mechanical/chemical/nuclear engineer, Amiram (Ami) Adini. The company’s beginnings date from 1987 when Adini recruited a fellow engineer to work with him on his first independent consulting project designing a chemical mixing and hazardous wastewater system for a plant in Gardena, California which was making chemicals for the electronic circuit printing industry. By the time the three-month project completed, Adini had discovered a great need for services in the field of environmental assessment and the replacement of leaking underground storage tank systems and so company attention turned in that direction.
“Phase I” Pioneering
Expanding the team and operating on Adini’s self-stated motto, “The drive to go where others would normally not,” the company won the bid for a project in August 1988 for Texaco, USA who was working on plans to liquidate a number of properties. Texaco had issued a request for proposals to conduct “Phase I Environmental Site Assessments” on 72 oil and gas producing properties throughout California, a project they wanted done in 5 weeks. At that time, there was no definition or set protocol as to what a “Phase I” assessment would entail. Adini’s company offered an attractive price and got the job. Beginning with a single property, they offered Texaco to pilot one oil field and create a model scope for Phase I work. This offer was accepted and they executed the groundbreaking work on the Vickers oil field in Los Angeles, thereby creating that model which they carried to the rest of the 72 properties.
Continuing the standards development path for Phase I Assessments, the company went on to work for the City of Anaheim on hundreds of properties, assisting in the creation of what is today the hub of the Anaheim civic center. By the time these projects were completed, a model Phase I report had been developed, tested and refined. In 1993 the generated the current commercially and legally recognized practice of Phase I for the United States.
Pioneering the “Fixed Price Cleanup”
In 2007, Ami Adini & Associates, Inc. (AA&A) pioneered a case where it committed to clean up contaminated soil and groundwater all the way to regulatory case closure on the basis of fixed price, regardless of what the ultimate cleanup requirements could be. The actual contamination in the soil was later found to be seven-fold larger in quantity and levels of contamination than originally described. AA&A stayed with the project for one more year, added extraction wells, brought machinery on site and carried it to regulatory closure. It thus provided the precedent that a case can be completed on a fixed price.
Currently AA&A is engaged in a project in Signal Hill, California, where it provides a 1000-foot long biological screen to prevent migration of contaminated groundwater into a nearby residential area. The project is performed on the basis of pre-guaranteed cleanup level and time to reach these levels.
Licenses & Certifications
The company is licensed as a Class A General Engineering Contractor and Class B General Building Contractor with Hazardous Substances Removal and Asbestos certification (Lic. # 587540). Adini’s company has members certified and/or registered as Professional Geologists, Environmental Assessors, and .
Some Ami Adini Publications
(in progress)
Educational Newsletters:
61 Groundwater Flow
66 Finding Buried Objects
68 How to Find Buried Objects: The Ground Penetrating Radar
70 How to Find Buried Objects: Electromagnetic Methods
71 How to Find Buried Objects. Electrical Resistivity
72 How to Find Buried Objects: Metal Detection
73 How to Find Buried Objects: Magnetic Methods
86 Drycleaning Operations & Their Impact on the Environment
90 Chemicals Used In Drycleaning Operations 1
91 Chemicals Used In Drycleaning Operations 2
92 Drycleaning Equipment & Drycleaning Operations
93 Waste Management Practices in Drycleaning Operations I
94 Waste Management Practices in Drycleaning Operations II
95 Waste Management Practices in Drycleaning Operations III
96 Contaminant Source Areas - Where to Sample - I
97 Contaminant Source Areas - Where to Sample - II
98 Contaminant Source Areas - Where to Sample - III
99 Contaminant Source Areas - Where to Sample IV
101 Env. Investigations in Dry Cleaning Operations
103 Drilling & Sampling Technologies - Sonic Drilling
106 Geology for the Uninitiated
108 What is Asbestos?
109 Probabilities and Possibilities in Phase 1 Env. Site Assessment
110 What is PCE?
111 PCBs and the Phase I Environmental Site Assessment
113 Exploding Grounds
114 On Identities, Similarities and Differences
115 The California Underground Storage Tank Cleanup Fund
116 Is It Absorption? Adsorption?
118 Advection
119 Interesting Numbers
120 Henry's Law
123 On the Communication of Concepts
124 Air Stripping
125 Air Sparging
126 Organic Compounds
127 What is a Lysimeter?
128 Monitoring Wells and Piezometers
130 ToxFAQs™
132 Stratigraphy
133 Orientation: Los Angeles Basin
134 California State Water Resources Control Board
135 “Radial Flow”
140 Hydraulic Gradient
141 Point Source
142 Non-point Source Pollution
143 “Permeable” Is “Porous,” but “Porous” May Not Be “Permeable”
144 Darcy’s Law”
147 Zone of Influence (ZOI)
148 Evaluation of Contaminated Properties
149 Finding the Direction of the Groundwater Flow
155 Extracting Liquid Contamination from Soils and Groundwater
156 The Groundwater Monitoring Well
157 Potential of Hydrogen and the Cleanup of Contaminated Aquifers
158 Appropriate Inquiry
159 Performance Based Standards
161 Oxidation and Reduction aka Redox
162 The Oxidation-Reduction Potential
164 Rocks and Water Series 1
168 Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)
169 Wetlands Assessment
171 Environmental Due Diligence in Real property Transactions
175 Environmental Base Line
176 Hydrogeologic Cycle
179 Petroleum Hydrocarbon Compounds; Series 3
180 Sulfates in Drinking Water
181 Risky Practices
184 On the Combustion of Fossil Fuel - A Global Impact
188 Combustion of Fossil Fuel - A Global Impact An Opposing View
189 Where Did That Chemical Go?
190 Deeper than Skin
191 Septic Tanks
192 MTBE 101
193 Canister Sampling
194 Vapor Intrusion-Mitigation
195 Taking open-ended contamination cases to CLOSURE
196 Chlorinated Solvents - An Invisible Menace
197 On the Removal of Chlorinated Solvents from Groundwater Aquifers
198 Flow-through Barriers
199 There’s Life in the Pits
200 The EPA's Citizen's Guide to Cleanup Technologies
201 EPA’s Citizen’s Guide - Bioremediation
202 EPA’s Citizen’s Guide - Soil Vapor Extraction and Air Sparging
203 EPA’s Citizen’s Guide - Greener Cleanups
Special Newsletter - June 21, 2011: A Billion Dollar Question
Special Newsletter - March 30, 2011: On Piezometers and Monitoring Wells
Special Newsletter - March 15, 2011: Course Information: Sustainable Remediation Methods
Special Newsletter - November 4, 2010: Environmental Stability and the California UST Cleanup Fund

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