User:Johnherrick

Hi, I am John Herrick, I am a Professional Engineer (registered in eight states) and a Professional Land Surveyor. I have been the City Engineer of two cities and have been involved professionally in many disasters, including preparation of a schedule to rebuild Structure 7 of the World Trade Center. I spent 15 months investigating the 200-mile corridor where Hurricane Katrina came through, including interviewing more than 200 of the survivors, interviewing the hospital staffs, interviewing the US Army Corps personnel, interviewing Coast Guard personnel, driving the levees, determining the extent of the storm surge, determining the rate and number of people who will be returning, etc.. I have my Microsoft Certified Professional certification and am a Certified Thermographer. My interests range from nuclear subjects (from the 928 nuclear tests in Nevada, to the MOX reprocessing of fuel and bomb pits in South Carolina, to the cleanup and transport of materials from Hanford, to the cleanup in Oak Ridge Tennessee -- I have worked at all of those sites) to Hurricane preparedness/first responders/and cleanup/rebuild, to water quality and on-line continuing education.

For fun I sail (I lived on my own yacht for 7 1/2 years), kayak, and am an avid photographer.

My contributions to this world of ours include the idea which has cleaned up the water around the State of Florida. After the State of Florida Department of Environmental Regulation created a draft of a very, very complicated set of rules for determining the pollutants in stormwater runoff, I recommended a simple solution: retention of the runoff from a one-inch rainstorm. This revolutionized the way stormwater runoff was treated. Up until that time stormwater runoff was only dumped off of every site with no water quality treatment.

A second contribution was in on-line continuing education (CE). I authored a website where you could take a course online, and have an online quiz graded when you completed the course, so that when you completed the course you would get credit from the licensing boards toward your required CE. I designed and implemented the prototype - it was called "OxfordInstitute.com" and was online in March of 2001. It then was transformed and became RedVector.com. I have a number of Continuing Education courses on the website that were authored by me.

I have set up and managed a materials testing lab, and had my own engineering and surveying company.

Being American is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then traveling home, grabbing Japanese sushi, Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch shows on a Taiwan made plasma TV. But the best thing about being American is an abiding suspicion of foreigners!