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My name is Robert Teberge.
I'm with Thurber Engineering Ltd. it's an environmental and geo-tech
engineering consultancy
and I'm a senior hydrogeologist.
So I deal with problems to do with groundwater
and soil
mostly from a contamination point-of-view but also from a
groundwater supply point of view.
There's a lot of project management skills so putting together
the various components of an investigation,
so you need a driller, you need a lab
and you need to have somebody that can actually go do the work
and then your own reporting time. Now what I do is just a
broad range of investigations, so I do
environmental investigations, land recycling
and environmental cleanup,
groundwater supply investigations, people that want to set up
subdivision, farms or industrial subdivisions, they want to
put in and a little warehouse or factory or something
and they need water well
or they need a septic field assessment. That kind of thing, so I do those.
Then there's towns, villages, they have lagoons
for waste lagoons or landfills
and those liners, those require permeability assessments to make sure
that they're tight and they don't leak.
So I do a lot of permeability barriers assessments. Sometimes you get a site
that so badly polluted the only way to deal with it is to contain it, so they
put in a grout barriers around the site and then that has to be tested too.
And then there's remediation, site remediation, so that's where
it becomes economic to actually dig up
and hallway, the contamination.
Landfill costs are really cheap in Alberta so that actually is very often the
alternative.
Doesn't seem to make sense to dig up dirty dirt and move it somewhere else
but
we've also run into a situation where it's too far to landfill or it's too
expensive to landfill the material
so that we actually treat it in place, so a very common
thing in Alberta, you'll have oil contamination so dig up the dirt and
then use thermal desorption, so you basically
burn the dirt
in place. You use a pug mill and then an incinerator
and you burn off the oil and then you've got clean dirt you can put it back.
I made a conscientious effort in the early part of a career
to read
job advertisements and job descriptions and to pick out the keywords
and to look, okay, what kind of courses should I get.
So communication skills, I took up extra writing courses.
And I worked a lot actually just
personally on interpersonal skills.
The primary thing is to be honest with yourself. The field work
component there is no getting around that it's a very location-specific career.
You will do a lot of traveling.
And if you're in Alberta, that means going up north. Fort McMurray, that's
where all the work is.
So you have to figure out how to work with frozen fingers and stuff like
that for at least two or three years. Be honest about what you
enjoy doing, what you like doing
and what you've done well in
and build on those things, build on your assets
and work with your defects if you have to.