Friday, January 8, 2010

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, and a new Seattle nonproft, "Environmental Research for Decision, Inc." or Research4D for short. A group of my friends at a party a while ago were kind enough to vote me as having introduced them to the most interesting new term: body spill. A subset of these same friends (plus one) form the Board of Directors of Research4D .

"Body spill", you ask? In a previous life I was a lead trajectory analyst with the great folks at the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration. My job was to be available 24x7 to provide trajectory forecasts for spills, airline disasters and other incidents across the US and abroad. At times we did search and recovery work (the US Coast Guard Search and Rescue where Rescue implies that the person is still alive). At times I was called on to provide trajectories in order to find people presumed not to be living any more, or find where their body might have come from.

Where things go in the water fascinates me, and I find ocean circulation and drift the most intersting topic that I could possibly work on. In truth, the NOAA chemists were the coolest people, as I just knew where to find things -- they knew if it might explode. For things that might explode, the most interesting incident that I didn't work on was the Igloo Moon. See the Miami Times article "In Too Deep" for information on that incident.

Again, welcome to environmental science intended for people that have to make decisions!

1 comment:

  1. If you want one of the most interesting incidents that did explode, look up the chemical tanker MAASGUSAR. That large ship exploded with the loss of all officers and crew about 15 hours outside of Yokohama a week before the EXXON VALDEZ. The incident, which was much more acutely dramatic, made CNN, but then was quickly replaced by the dead birds in Alaska. To this day, nobody really knows why it happened.

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