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News | May 17, 2021

Gimcheon environmental chief honored

By Jake Joy DLA Disposition Services Public Affairs

Danny Kim was recently named Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services Employee of the Quarter for the second quarter of fiscal 2021.

Kim was honored for contributions made in his relatively new role as lead environmental specialist for the Gimcheon property disposal site in South Korea. He has just over a year of total service with the agency, with about seven of those months spent in Korea and six months prior to that as an environmental contracting officer representative at the Fort Meade site in Maryland.

In his award nomination, Kim was cited for, among many other things, developing and training two new environmental contracting officer representatives and helping expand the site’s ability to meet customer demands for hazardous waste removal throughout the Korea peninsula. He also devised a plan to divide up generators by areas to evenly distribute workload and travel requirements.

“His superb ability to lead his team with a customer focus is resulting in improved hazardous waste disposal support to our Korea warfighters,” wrote Area Manager Chris Dunsmoore. “His outstanding detailed monthly review of environmental documentation for completeness and accuracy has significantly improved the quality of products the environmental team is producing.”  

Kim said the staff at Gimcheon is a hard-working group that has earned its solid reputation.

“My position affords me the opportunity to work on unique and challenging situations,” Kim said. “But Gimcheon’s environmental office success would not be possible without the people I work with and the high-level of cohesion and efficiency we all strive for. … I truly believe that Gimcheon’s successes are attributed to the resiliency of the staff and high level of professionalism portrayed day in and day out.”

He cited the organization’s transparency and the level of importance it places on communications as a couple of the things he enjoys most about working for DLA Disposition Services.

“It’s difficult to find an organization that is willing to openly share information with its people,” Kim said. “It has been my experience, more often than not, that information is so compartmentalized that the employee never truly gets to see and understand the message or intent.”

In fact, it was a communique from a colleague on the other side of the world that brought him the news of his recognition award.

“An old co-worker from my days at Ft. Meade reached out to me to congratulate me as I was on my way to work,” Kim said. “I had no clue what she was talking about until I logged into my computer and saw the flood of congratulatory emails in my inbox.”