Elizabeth Burgess, 30

It took New York City about a hundred years of dumping coal ash into Willets Point to turn the 23-acre triangle in Queens into the “Valley of Ashes,” an industrial wasteland inhabited by ghost-like people in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

And it’s taken most of Elizabeth Burgess’s career to remediate it. 

Burgess has been at Langan for six years. She’s managed a variety of environmental consulting projects on brownfield sites in New York City, but the Willets Point development — a public-private partnership with the city’s Economic Development Corporation, Related Companies, Sterling Equities and Langan — has been the longest running. 

“To see that much space in New York City being remediated at one time is just incredible,” Burgess said. “Typically we have much smaller areas.”

Beginning in 2018, Burgess has coordinated the work of an interdisciplinary team of geotechnical and civil engineers who trucked out more than 150 tons of contaminated soil from the site and treated about 250,000 gallons of petroleum-impacted groundwater. They also removed about two dozen underground storage tanks and installed a bespoke steel groundwater cutoff wall to seal off the development site before construction can begin. 

Compared to that, other remediation projects Burgess has worked on around the five boroughs are a breeze. That includes the site-wide remediation of 300 Huntington Street, a commercial property on the banks of the Gowanus Canal that Monadnock Development is transforming into a six-story, mixed-use building. 

Burgess began her environmental consulting career working for Dewberry in New Jersey after earning her master’s in systems engineering from Cornell University. But, in a way, she said, the move to New York City felt inevitable. “Whenever I work on a project, I get to see it on the skyline eventually. So it’s just a very cool, tangible kind of thing.”