When I saw the job for Senior Environmental Consultant advertised by 4Pillars, I immediately thought that this could be a near perfect fit. A few weeks later now, I am pleased that James must have thought along the same lines and I am thrilled to have joined the team. I cannot wait to collaborate and share our skills and experiences, in the varied branches of environmental practice.
Towards the end of last century, I finished my studies in Petroleum Engineering at a small but highly regarded mining university in Austria. Unfortunately, I never applied my knowledge in drilling and producing oil, specialising in hydraulic fracturing, (yes, that has been around for a very long time), because straight after submitting my thesis I started working for a newly opened company in Australia. OTEK Australia is unfortunately no longer in existence, but it specialised in the assessment and remediation of the mess that oil companies tend to cause during their operations. Having gained my PhD in studies relating to the oil industry I started my career in contaminated sites.
A few years later I joined the (then) State Rail Authority (SRA) as the main technical advisor for their regional assessment program. The SRA was one of the largest land owners in NSW and was tasked with raising a load of money for the Sydney Olympics by selling some of that land. Since most of the land was situated along the rail corridors and was almost exclusively leased for commercial or industrial land uses, it had a good chance of being contaminated. The then Environmental Services Manager for the SRA had the foresight to get a specialised contaminated sites person on board with the task of supervising a panel of consultancy firms from a technical point of view and make sure that the results that were presented by the consultancies were sound and usable (not vague and ambiguous). I was exposed to the assessment of about 1,000 sites within a handful of years. Some sites were small and done and dusted with a letter report. Some were massive in size and some were massive as far as impact is concerned. They all came past my desk and I was able to work with and observe the best consultants Sydney had to offer.
After the Olympics my job at the SRA was done and I ventured into a completely different area by founding an IT service company with two friends. It was the middle of the ‘dot com boom’ and if everything had gone to plan, I would be hanging out with people like Gates, Musk and Brin or Page now. That did not quite happen, but the company is still around and is doing well. I left in 2008 and lived a bit of a reclusive life for a while. I really enjoyed a time with no hardware or software issues, no data centres, no employees and no clients, just family and – my trading.
Let me explain. For a long time, I have had an interest in trading stock and index options and had tried to master that, well, art. I made that hobby my profession and loved (almost) every moment of it. I really got good at it which is something I am immensely proud of. I even have a small fund set up for friends and family and I am providing good results for them (fingers crossed). A little side project I did in that time was producing a trading related 10-series podcast where I interviewed a number of amazing people, some of them you may even know. Check it out, it’s at gutrade.net.
In the midst of all that my former boss at SRA called me up and to make a long story short, managed to drag me back into environmental work. I had been out of that line of work for over a decade but surprisingly I found it not only easy to slip back into, but I also found that I really enjoyed working in that field again. Field work was never something I was very fond of, but suddenly after many years of mostly thinking in terms of options prices, market movements and spreadsheet cells while hiding behind a computer, I enjoyed the odd field trip. I realised that my report writing skills were still there and quickly caught up with the changes in legislation and processes that had happened. Suddenly I was in the midst of it all, working in contaminated sites, working on sometimes small, sometimes large projects, some of them mainstream, some of them exceptionally exciting.
And now another chapter starts – with 4Pillars, and I am sure it will be great! I’ll be leading projects in contamination assessment, remediation, waste classification and using my depth of knowledge to provide solutions to our clients.
In line with the rest of the team, a few personal points about me. I love podcasts. Since I spend so much time in the car travelling, I get a fair bit of podcasting time. Going through my list there are quite a few science related ones like The Skpetics Guide to the Universe, Science vs and Skeptoid. My time in the IT industry still shows its traces, I guess, with me enjoying listening to Darknet Diaries, Security InThirty or Decrypted. Politically and socially themed shows I regularly listed to are We the People Live with Aussie Josh Zepps as the host, Sam Harris’ Making Sense or Bill Maher’s Real Time. And then pure entertainment comes from shows like 99% Invisible, This American Life, Twenty Thousand Hertz, The Moth or The Story Collider. As far as sports are concerned I (almost by default being from Austria) am a fairly decent skier, I also used to be able to hit a tennis ball quite well. These days its more taking the new dog for a walk/run. Other than tennis, I do not follow any sports regularly. AFL I can see could be interesting, but not having grown up in Oz, I guess I miss a certain connection!!
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