 Eldon Gath
Engineering Geologist
Earth Consultants International
Orange, CA
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 BS, Univ. of
Minnesota (Geology)
MS, UCLA
(Engineering Geology)
PhD, UC
Riverside (Geology) |
 |
Engineering
Geologist |
 |
"Almost everybody in
this business should start in the field. If you don't understand
the field, you will never understand how to make good decisions
in the office." |
Gath:
"The business that I'm in here in Southern California, and in my company,
Leighton, in particular, is really driven by the construction industry. We
experienced a severe downturn in the housing market, and as a consequence
we lost a great deal of business and consequently had to shrink the size
of the company."
Gath:
"Almost everybody in
this business should start in the field. If you don't understand the
field, you will never understand how to make good decisions in the office.
You have got to be out there and see how things are built, to do the
investigations, to do the design work, and to see it under construction.
Eventually, as you move up in any career, you become less and less
field-oriented and more and more office-oriented. And you need to fight
that. Because that is just the wrong way to go. As you lose touch with the
field you also lose touch with the reason you're doing the work in the
first place, and you lose touch with the reason that - you lose touch with
how things are being done now."
Mr. Gath received a B.S. in geology from the Institute of Technology at
the University of Minnesota in 1978. Since moving to California in 1979,
he has been active in post-graduate education, first in engineering
geology at California State University at Los Angeles, and most currently
in the Ph.D. program in geology at the University of California at
Riverside, from which he is on a yearlong leave of absence while serving
as President of the Association of Engineering Geologists. Eldon planned
to be a chemist, but after a bad-lab day came a geomorphology field trip,
looking at terraces of the Minnesota River, followed by a campfire
discussion of geology and life. That was all it took to forget about the
indoor life of a chemist. Not really liking the rocks, minerals, and the
mining side of geology, he discovered engineering geology and immediately
clicked with its involvement in civil structures and dynamic geologic
processes affecting public safety like landslides and earthquakes. Eldon
joined Pacific Soils Engineering in Irvine, California in 1980, and then
Leighton and Associates in 1984, eventually becoming Director of Geology
for their Los Angeles Regional Center, a Principal in the firm in 1989,
and on the Board of Directors in 1992.
In January, 1997, he was appointed President of Earth Consultants
International, a new affiliated company of Leighton. His projects have
ranged from residential subdivision developments for hundreds of homes,
city and county General Plan Safety Elements, seismic design and active
fault studies for numerous projects, landslide remediation investigations,
regional planning studies, and active fault research studies for the U.S.
Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center. He has
been active in numerous professional organizations, including President of
the Association of Engineering Geologists, and membership in the,
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Geological Society of America,
American Geophysical Union, Seismological Society of America, and the
American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
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