I will reach a milestone in 2015, 50 years as water resources professional. When you reach such milestones, your mind often returns to the past. I find myself dwelling on my early years working in a private laboratory and how influential those years were on my life and about how lucky I was to get out when I did.

What is your perception of laboratories and the people who work in them? Mine was of rumpled people with wild hair in white coats working with liquids boiling in elaborate science fiction-like glass apparatuses. And, guess what? When I started working in the laboratory, it was very much like that.

Actually, my first real job was not working with water but was in a lab that developed ion exchange resins, those little beads that are found in water softener tanks that actually do "soften" water. This company, located in Redwood City, California, consisted of offices, laboratories and a separate manufacturing plant. We worked with some really smelly organic chemicals. The one that I got up close and personal with was called trimethylamine and the smell was truly awful. When I got back to our apartment each day, the first thing I did was get out of my clothes, grab a shower, dress in clean clothes, and hang the work clothes outside to air out. My wife steered clear of me until I was cleaned up. This was in the early 1960's.

Neither the company nor the employees had a clue about environmental contamination and the environmental protection laws in the United States were few, indeed. The plant belched smoke into the atmosphere. Toxic? No doubt! In the labs, waste material that couldn't be poured down the drain, was put in "pit" bottles. The bottles were collected, taken outside and dumped into a pit dug in the soil behind the laboratory, or taken to San Francisco Bay and disposed of on the tidal flats. Water pollution? Soil contamination? Yes! I couldn't help but wonder about the potential damage to the environment and this was the beginning of my slow conversion to the environmentalist I am now.

In the mid-1990's, I was in the Redwood City area and drove past the address to show a colleague the location of my first real job. When we arrived, there were no buildings. Instead there was a high fence around the leveled property with a sign from the Environmental Protection Agency indicating that the area inside the fence was a CERCLA site, in other words, a seriously contaminated area.

I only worked there for 2.5 years before moving on to the U. S. Geological Survey. I kept in touch with a couple of the people I worked with in Redwood City. Within a matter of three or four years, the first of the people I worked with had died of lung cancer, followed in the next few years by several more.

Whether it was exposure to the nasty chemicals that we worked with or whether it was from smoking that did in my colleagues because they were heavy smokers, I'll never know. I would speculate that it was a combination of the two. My 50 years in water can be attributed to the fact that I got away from that lab at the right time. In those days, a lab could be a very dangerous place!