Michael J. Fichera is a Principal Consultant for ERM. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering and an M.E. in Environmental Engineering from Manhattan College. He has experience since 1993 in oil and chemical spill modeling and toxicity assessments, mud and drill cuttings deposition modeling, water quality modeling, and natural resource damage assessments. Michael has been involved in several studies of the Delaware Inland Bays including temperature plume studies, fish / larvae entrainment and impingement simulations, circulation improvement predictions, and nutrient TMDL analyses for DNREC.
He has been involved in several major spills including the San Jacinto River, Texas (1994), Humboldt Bay, California (1999), Chalk Point, Maryland (2000), Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts (2003), Delaware River (2004), the Gulf of Mexico in response to releases associated with Hurricane Katrina (2005), Lake Charles, Louisiana (2006), the Deepwater Horizon spill (2010), Refugio Cove (2015), and Galveston Bay (2019). Michael’s experience during spills includes providing expert testimony, emergency response site investigations, modeling the fate and transport of oil slicks and subsurface contamination, and providing both preliminary (rapid-response) and detailed natural resource damage estimates.
He has also performed stochastic hypothetical predictions of spills for environmental impact statements and oil spill response plans for the marine environment, in estuaries, and at pipeline crossings in rivers. Michael has researched dissolved oil toxicity for biological effect modeling.
