Bringing a wealth of knowledge and innovation to Atlan’s Engineering team, Oscar Bentham provides engineering guidance, design assistance and sustainability advice for our clients across a wide range of flagship stormwater projects.
Winner of the Young Professional of the Year (Stormwater NSW) in 2021, Oscar offers our clients vital insights into primary treatment specifications and subsurface stormwater solutions. Advocating for the maintenance of our stormwater network, Oscar’s work helps to improve asset service life and fosters sustainable communities.
What is your role at Atlan?
I assist consultants, councils and internal teams at Atlan with product specifications and provide value engineering for stormwater design. Outside of this scope, I build (Atlan’s) sizing tools, prepare conference white papers and assist the maintenance team as an SME.
Which stormwater technologies are you passionate about?
I am passionate about practical stormwater solutions – complete packages that are easy to install, easy to design and importantly, easy to maintain.
I enjoy the water quality side of things – creating a difference and protecting the environment. Atlan’s Vortceptor is a market leader in primary treatment, which I believe is an area that is vital – and where many projects fail.
If primary treatment fails, then tertiary treatment will also fail. If your GPT design is wrong, it doesn’t matter how great you make your bioretention or filtration; having the best primary treatment is critical.
How can engineers benefit from design assistance?
If you look at a typical construction job, you’ve got engineers, developers, council and your builders. From the engineer’s perspective, they will save time in sizing and drafting water quality and quantity components, and have confidence that the builder, developer and local council endorse the Atlan infrastructure.
Consultants reaching out to Atlan to value engineer their stormwater designs will produce practical and cost-effective solutions that their clients will appreciate. Everyone benefits from potentially getting more yield from their properties or optimising the treatment to minimise the maintenance costs.
What is the benefit of SQIDEP?
The key thing with SQIDEP is that it’s trying to bring trust into the industry. For quite a long time, consultants and councils have had to trust different proprietors. It allows them to have trust – there is an overarching organisation (Stormwater Australia) that is providing an accreditation with a stringent protocol.
Why is stormwater integral to sustainable communities?
If you look at major cities around the world, they are basically always situated near a key water body – a lake, river or harbour. Good stormwater management, such as treatment and detention, is important to preserving these environments and their ecology.
The flow on effects of poor management ripples all the way down to the local community – and our lifestyle and mental health.