Tank Farm Contractors
Westinghouse Hanford Lockheed Martin Hanford CH2M HILL Hanford
E. Ivar Husa

My career at the Tank Farm Contractor, under its many names, has had me filling a variety of different roles, but mostly centering around information management. I was also a significant contributor to safety.

Surveillance Analysis Computer System (SACS)

I was hired to work within the Tank Farm Surveillance group to develop new processes for handling surveillance data, initially the tank surface level and temperature data. These data were critical to the safe operation of the facility. The primary recordkeeping was on paper, and that had to change.

I worked the interface between tank farm management and the software development team. I spoke the language of both camps, and played a significant role in the development of the requirements specification.

I also performed ad-hoc data queries on the system being developed. The initial implementation used Oracle software on UNIX workstations. I handled the capital procurement of the computers, too.

LOOKUP

Along the way, I found a better way of doing business, using custom software I had written. The software allowed me to search a text file containing 'phone book' types of data in a particularly powerful way. Users of the software could specify any of several types of identifying information about a person, such as a first name and a building they were in, and all records were searched rapidly for matches. The software returned a detailed listing for an individual, including their reporting chain on up to the CEO. This was very useful to people around the site, and I won several awards for it, ad site-wide savings over $1M were claimed. The initial implementation was in UNIX commands, such as SED, AWK, and GREP. The most widespread version was distributed as a Turbo Pascal executable. The final version, shown at right, was done in Visual Basic.

Corrosion Engineering

I spent several years working with the corrosion engineers, which wasn't a stretch, because my masters degree was in materials engineering. However, my primary contribution to this group was software. I created custom tools in Visual Basic for the management of their cathodic protection system, and for data reduction (shown at right, double-click for full size image).

Tank Waste Information Network System (TWINS)

The SACS project fed a data distribution system that we had built by Battelle called TWINS. It became the primary distribution vehicle for tank data. I spent a number of years contributing to its development and support. I was a key user of the system, and provided local support in the 200 Areas for TWINS customers. I would help trouble-shoot, or create special data reports on an as-needed basis.

Best Basis Inventory Management

My last assignment at the Tank Farm Contractor (CH2M HILL) used the Best Basis Inventory Management System (BBIM) software, created for us by Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Labs. The BBIM was created to provide a defensible, reliable method for determining the contents of the underground waste storage tanks in the 200 Areas. My role was to process data from a sub-contractor into the formal database, doing error checking along the way.

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