Anyone who has lived in southern California long enough knows that this is fault country, and if you are a property owner you have an obligation to yourself to safeguard your property against damage from earthquakes. Earthquake prediction science is as yet not developed enough to know when one will strike. But no one has…
I recently have been involved in some projects in which the homeowner wants to make some additions to his residence in the city of La Canada Flintridge. Many of the estate residences south of Foothill on LCF are serviced by septic tanks and cesspools, and public sewer connection is not available for these areas. Often the unavailability…
What do you do when you need to be at three places at the same time? A consulting geologist or engineer in southern California will be challenged with this all the time. So you set up a Mobile Office! It’s not always pretty, but it should work. Here is a recent example from this week.…
Wearing suits is cool. But as geologists, we don’t get to wear suits daily. Ours is generally a much more casual dress code, driven mostly by the fact that a practicing geologist will spend at least half of his working hours in the field, climbing in and out of test holes, mapping, hiking, and frolicking…
Wake up. Wash up. Make some coffee, grab a breakfast bar and hit the road before sunrise and rush hour. First stop: methane test in West Hollywood. Afterward head into the hills to perform a “dig alert” to notify utility companies before we perform our field exploration. Next comes a grading Deputy inspection in Mid-City…
