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Chris Parrotta loves a good adventure. He recalls a recent project where he was heading out to do some wastewater sampling. That in itself isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary for someone at HRP. What made this sampling endeavor unique was that it had to happen in the middle of the night.

“It was kind of fun,” Chris says. “This particular client was a pasta manufacturer, and we needed to do sampling after hours when the facility wasn’t as busy.”

Chris was monitoring the water that was discharged into a sanitary sewer that came from the big vats the manufacturer pressure washes and cleans. The sampling procedures were to ensure the discharge met the criteria for the sanitary sewer.

“We were out in the middle of the night taking samples every four hours. It was an adventure, and that really speaks to what I like about HRP. Every day is a little bit different.”

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Chris began his career working as a Civil Engineer for the City of Bristol, Connecticut. Coming from a family that largely works in the STEM fields, Chris was encouraged to pursue engineering from a young age by his father, an electrical engineer. With a love for designing things and being outside, civil engineering was a logical choice.

He found, during his time working for the City of Bristol, that he wasn’t doing as much designing as he wanted.

“I felt more like an inspector,” Chris says. “I felt like I was just making sure things were running smoothly. That’s probably the difference between government work and private work. I wanted to do a little more running around. I wanted to experience different things.”

As a Project Consultant at HRP, Chris gets that opportunity to be involved with a little bit of everything. He’ll visit sites to oversee installation; he designs sub-slab depressurization systems to prevent soil gasses from infiltrating a building. He also completes site and grading plans and Property Condition Assessments (PCA) reports, and works closely with the Geo team at HRP.

“There are a lot of paths you can take in engineering,” Chris says. “You can go to a big consulting firm that has 2,000 people and you’ll get one role. Maybe that’s designing bridges, or maybe something else. Either way, that’s what you do every day. If you work for a municipality, you’re getting more involved with the community. But at HRP, we do a lot of different things, work on a lot of different projects, and get the opportunity to learn about a lot of stuff more quickly than you would otherwise. At HRP, you don’t get stuck in one role, and there’s a lot of cross collaboration across the various teams at the firm.”

Outside of work, you can find Chris seeking out enjoying the great outdoors. He’s an avid skier / snowboarder. He’s also always up for a challenge. Recently, Chris built a wooden surfboard by hand after watching a YouTube video – a challenge issued by his father.

“He didn’t think I’d be able to do it,” Chris says, “but I took on the challenge and got it done. It’s probably a little over-engineered, but I can stand on it.”

Chris has also taken up what he likes to call the “caveman’s version of pottery” – using power tools to create sculptures out of wood.

“We were clearing an area for a ground mount solar panel lot and we had cut up a big beech tree and had no idea what to do with it,” recalls Chris. “I pulled up YouTube and watched a couple of videos and took out the chainsaw and started sectioning pieces of the tree and turned it into a bear.”