Southern CA Pioneers
Saluting Some of the Outstanding Pioneers
of Engineering Geology in Southern California.
Richard J. Proctor, J. David Rogers, and Allen W. Hatheway
SUMMARY
It is our premise that more challenge and innovation came to face applied geologists in Southern California, than any other region of similar size and ultimate population growth, across the planet. We reflect on fourteen of our outstanding technical forebears.
Southern California has largely been a 20th-century phenomenon. This land of “milk and honey” experienced a normal, but spirited and orderly growth until the advent of World War II, when the Pacific Theater of that war brought this fair land to the forefront of a frenzied degree activity that yet remains with us.
With the end of the war, the aircraft industry was poised to make the jump to the space industry, easterners and foreign emigrants alike streamed into this promised land and with them came an unbridled expansion of population. Population growth quickly stressed the land to its physical limits, on the hillsides, along the shores, its groundwater resource, its ability to handle huge amounts of industrial, agricultural and urban wastes and the magnified effects of California’s dreaded aperiodic natural hazards; earthquakes, weak-rock slope instability, flash floods, brush and forest fires, overdraught aquifers and salt-water intrusion.
Truly, the human agent had the mechanical fruits of war-time construction advancements, mainly the were-with-all to rip, tear and grade the flats and hillsides and development clashed with the ability of infrastructure to support the expansion. Into this realm stepped the civil engineer, freshly licensed to practice (1928) in the wake of the St. Francis dam-failure disaster, and, by virtue of disastrous effects of poorly-controlled hillside development and the typically sustained spring-time rain fall.
By 1955, a key year, the hillsides were overtaxed, the highways were overwhelmed, the pre-1920 electric transit system had been scrapped, the population was surging, and industrial waste was fouling the limited potable water supply. Try as they might, the civil engineers, architects, planners, zoning commissions and building and municipal building safety personnel could not cope with the new and ongoing damage that was universally coupled with an indifferent and insensitive appreciation of geologic constraints. Within two years, engineering geology became a panacea of sorts, the nation’s first licensure of our profession was born, our Association was founded, and the leading universities began to train our practitioners.
This was but a short fifty years ago. In those years our profession has stood fast and has risen to meet the myriad challenges and the struggle has been anything but placid or easy. We needed strong leaders, and they were forged by the “live or die” situation that faced them. Practice in southern California has been anything but easy and the prices paid by those who have survived have been as high as are found in any profession; the legacy, however, has been a fit and proper as it could possibly have been, and southern California practice has, in most ways of technology and professionalism, set a broad standard of excellence not only nationwide, but across the world.
Join us in reviewing the lives of some of our heroes: John P. Buwalda, Thomas Wilson Dibblee Jr., Rollin Eckis, Perry L. Ehlig, Mason Lowell Hill, Richard H. Jahns, F. Leslie Ransome, Charles F. Richter, Mike Scullin, James Edward Slosson, Dorothy LaLonde Stout, Martin Lindy Stout, and Eugene B. “Gene” Waggoner.
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Compiled and presented expressly for the 50th Anniversary Meeting of AEG;
held in Los Angeles, California, September, 2007.
[downloads_box title=”Library Documents:”]John P. Buwalda (1886 – 1954)
Thomas Wilson Dibblee Jr. (1911 – 2004)
Mason Lowell Hill (1904 – 1993)
Richard H. Jahns (1915 – 1983)
John F. Mann, Jr. (1921 – 1998)
F. Leslie Ransome (1868 – 1935)
Charles F. Richter (1900 – 1985)
James Edward Slosson (1923 – 2007)
Dorothy LaLonde Stout (1941 – 2001)
Martin Lindy Stout (1934 – 1994)
Eugene B. “Gene” Waggoner (1913 – 1991)
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