Steve Richard grew up in California with a family heating and sheet metal business that was started in 1932 by his grandparents. His family roots in California started when his Scottish great-grandfather settled in the Santa Barbara area around 1898.
“I worked construction with the family business to get through college. Our family had been in the business for a very long time,” he said. “We worked on a lot of celebrity’s houses, including some really big ones like Oprah Winfrey.”
Richard earned a geo-physics degree with an emphasis on physics from the University of California in Santa Barbara. In some ways he followed in the footsteps of his father, who was an engineer for the major defense contractor Raytheon.
But as he entered the professional workforce, Richard used his education and training to do environmental engineering and consulting, including geo-technical and environmental work as a consultant.
“It was a really great experience. My initial work was quality control and environmental work for landfills,” he said of the start of his career. “I also installed groundwater monitoring wells and soil vapor extraction systems. Most of the work was underground storage tanks for the California LUFT program – did that about 10 years until the economic downturn in 2009.”
His career expanded his environmental and occupational health and safety expertise when he landed a challenging position as a Hazardous Materials Specialist and Environmental and Health and Safety Officer with the California Department of Corrections in 2010, which opened a whole new area of interest for him.
“From 2010 to 2013, I was working as a hazard materials specialist. I managed hazardous waste and materials and that got me into a field that I didn’t appreciate enough, overseeing environmental health and safety,” he said. “One of the projects I was tasked with from 2010 to 2012 was to prepare a prison complex for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and aerosol transmissible disease outbreaks. My job was to update certain procedures to ensure health and safety in a very difficult environment. One of the biggest concerns regarding aerosol transmissible diseases was the spread of Tuberculosis.”
His work was effective enough to be replicated across the state.
“That program got copied for 30 other prisons,” he said. “It dealt with prevention, disinfection, anything to deal with an aerosol transmissible disease. It became a model procedure for others to follow. One of the more interesting things I learned in the process is the sun is your natural vaccine—we found that in the Spanish flu that as soon as they started moving patients outside, everybody got healthier.”
After this work, Richard then worked as an Oil and Gas Engineer with the State of California Division of Oil and Gas and Geothermal Resources (formerly DOGGR, now CalGem). One of his major accomplishments was writing regulations for the state with regards to Hydraulic Fracturing of oil and gas wells (fracking). He also developed a field program and forms for state field engineers to witness (field document and evaluate) fracking in the state.
“I learned a lot about the oil industry, when it came to the physics, the fluid and thermodynamics, and that was very interesting to me – the science I studied really helped me and I enjoyed doing that,” he said.
“The oil industry incorporates so many different disciplines to understand what’s going on out there. I always did my best to make sure that we were doing the right thing, to try to not let the politics of the situation sway anything.”
Richard then made a family decision to accept a position with the U.S. Army Environmental Command in the great state of Texas where he could use his expertise and background as an environmental support manager – a position he says he truly enjoys.
“I think the Army is surprisingly positive. I like the work environment. I like the people involved. The Army has great programs for all the different (environmental) disciplines. We have a lot of opportunities,” he said. “There’s a lot of different growth potential. If you really want to, you can expand. There’s always something interesting out there that can be done if you want to go do it – I like that.”
Richard also praised the Army’s commitment to health and safety for soldiers and the public as mirroring the best he encountered in his career in the private sector.
“The Army reminds me a little bit of Chevron – the pinnacle of worker safety and protecting the public built into everything,” he said.
“I’ve had family that’s been in the military, but not in a military civilian role. Now (as an environmental support engineer) I’m really learning more about some of these sites. There’s a lot of checks and balances to make sure things are done correctly. I never got really truly involved in that – the new experience is what I enjoy most about it. I’m learning new things, and I really like that.”
Social Sharing