My Background - Part 4

Back Home to Georgia - 1991-2000

After finishing Geology grad school with my Master's Degree in the Spring of 1990, I had to determine what the next chapter was going to be and where it would take place.  My aunt and uncle in Phoenix were wanting me to move there, but it was just too hot.

After living away from home, greenery, actual running creeks, and Southern-style shredded pork barbeque since early 1977, I was ready to "fly back towards the nest".  I just needed a change from El Paso.  After 14 years, I extricated myself from "the Rio Grande Mud". 

A high school/college friend (by then an attorney) had told me that if needed, he had some work for me doing real estate title work.  So with some trepidation, we packed up a 26-foot U-Haul truck, hooked our '85 Chevy Cavalier to a trailer behind, and with a friend, headed to Georgia.  

After settling in my Georgia hometown, I went to work doing the real estate titles, from approximately May '91 until early '92, when I was laid-off due to a cash crunch.  While searching for full-time work, I managed to get more work by running titles for an environmental remediation firm for what we now call "Phase 1 Assessments".

In early June '92, I was notified that I had an upcoming interview with the Georgia Geologic Survey.  I got the job and I was assigned to take over the ongoing Tritium Project, centered on Burke County, south of Augusta and across the Savannah Savannah Rover from SRS (the Savannah River Site).  The project was an assessment on Tritium in the aquifers of eastern Burke County, from SRS activities since the 1950s.  It was known to be in above-background levels (about 20% of the EPA Maximum Contaminant Limit) in the unconfined surface aquifer (known as the Upper Three Runs Aquifer).  

Of greater concern was that it had shown up in a public trailer park well, drilled into the shallowest confined aquifer, the Gordon aquifer.  (Sometime later, our investigation determined that a lightning strike probably shattered the PVC well casing within the shallow aquifer interval, causing the contamination.)  At no point did we find any hazardous Tritium levels during our assessments and measurements.  Through several reports and samplings that continued into mid-1998, that remained the case.

After that report, I then went onto the ongoing STATEMAP Project for mid-1998 to mid-2000, singularly-mapping seven USGS 7.5 minute quads between Americus and Perry, GA.  I saw a number of cool things, met interesting people, and made some fossil discoveries of Middle and Late Eocene crinoids, echinoids, and brachiopods.  But the travel and other things made it necessary to seek work elsewhere.  It was time to move on.

I had specifically wanted to work for the Georgia Geologic Survey, not because I wanted to work for the government, but because I wanted to be a small part of Georgia Geologic history.  I got the chance to make some small contributions and I got my name on several publications.