Goodwin University · East Hartford, Connecticut
Twenty years on Goodwin's riverfront.
A petroleum tank farm on the Connecticut River became a university campus. ZUVIC has been its civil engineer and environmental consultant since 2004.
- Owner
- Goodwin University
- Location
- East Hartford, Connecticut
- Since
- August 10, 2004
- Projects
- 215 since 2004
How it started
ZUVIC first worked on the riverfront for Motiva Enterprises in the late 1990s, surveying the tank farm at 211 Riverside Drive and preparing its Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure plan. When Motiva began decommissioning the property, the plan included demolishing the docks on the river. ZUVIC convinced them to leave the docks standing.
A few years later, Goodwin College's president, Mark Scheinberg, stood on that contaminated riverfront and said it would one day be a university. On July 28, 2004, he met with ZUVIC on the site to talk about what it could become. ZUVIC's first proposal to the college is dated August 10, 2004. The docks are now home to the R.V. Goodwin Navigator, a 40-foot research vessel.
The riverfront terminals
Two former bulk terminals, at 133 and 195 Riverside Drive, entered Connecticut's Voluntary Remediation Program in 2008. ZUVIC planned the cleanup and documented the excavation. It ran more than a decade of groundwater monitoring and won state approval of cleanup criteria suited to a river setting. 133 Riverside was verified in 2019, and CT DEEP audited and accepted that verification in 2020. 195 Riverside is still being treated, and ZUVIC runs the system.
Two magnet schools
Nearby, another former terminal became the $37 million Connecticut River Academy magnet school. ZUVIC removed contaminated soil from five areas and installed product-recovery wells. It designed the engineered cap, which CT DEEP approved in 2012, and specified the vapor barrier and venting under the school. It has inspected the cap and reported on the groundwater every year since 2014.
Across campus, the Pathways Academy magnet high school went up on a 4.23-acre parcel that had been parking, farm fields and an electrical substation. ZUVIC cleaned it to residential standards while the school was being built, and CT DEEP closed it with a Letter of No Audit in 2016. The school carries no deed restriction.
Main Street
As the campus grew along Main Street, the parcels got smaller and their histories got busier. At a former gas station, now the site of a $12 million campus building at 365 Main Street, ZUVIC managed eleven excavations, one of them expanded twice to chase lead. The state chose not to audit the verification in 2019. At a former tire shop and metal-plating site at 339 Main Street, a $5 million project, a use restriction had been approved but never recorded. ZUVIC's LEP rebuilt it, it was recorded in 2025, and the first annual inspection found the site compliant.
The campus around it
The civil work runs alongside: a parking lot rebuilt and certified by the Town about five months after approval, a riverside trail that extends from East Hartford toward Wethersfield and Glastonbury, planned around state rare-plant and bald-eagle reviews, and storm sewers sized for future development along Ensign Street. When Goodwin financed campus projects through the state's bond authority in 2024, ZUVIC ran the environmental review of six properties and worked through every follow-up item.
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ZUVIC Inc., a Rocky Hill, Connecticut engineering firm, has been Goodwin University's campus civil engineer and environmental consultant in East Hartford since 2004, cleaning former fuel terminals and designing the campus that replaced them: 215 projects and counting.