Photo Essay

Ignacio Rivera is a very intelligent man who somewhat loves his job. “It’s a job,” answered Ignacio an Environmental Engineer at SpaWar in San Diego California when I asked him how he liked his job. He has been working here at SpaWar for about 15 years now and he says, “I like it at times.” Some projects that he has worked on in the past have been a horrible experience and some are the best experiences he has ever had with a project. “There was this project on developing a model to estimate the water quality criterion for copper in coastal harbors. The project lasted about five years, and included scientists from several different areas of expertise, including, modelers, biologists, chemists, oceanographers, toxicologists, etc. There were several publications out of this project, and the final product is in the process to be approved by EPA for use in coastal environments.” This is Ignacio’s most memorable project of his career. I asked Ignacio why he likes his job and he responded, “Some projects are way off my field of expertise, and require extra effort to deal with. In contrast, those projects that involve my actual expertise seem to be the more interesting ones.” This was interesting to me because some people wonder how someone can work in a job that they don’t like or are not interested in. Here is a man who still tries hard and puts in all of his effort even if he doesn’t like what he is working on at the moment. The benefit of this makes the projects he does like working on that much more interesting and exciting.

Internship was a great experience for me but the 3 weeks was not enough. After the three-week emersion I was invited to go out in the “field” with my mentor and a couple of his coworkers. We traveled to Camp Pendleton located north of Oceanside where we needed to deploy a probe. This probe tests for water temperature, PH and depth. We arrived at about 9 AM and to our arrival the weather was cloudy with a nice ocean breeze. Located under a bridge was where we had to deploy the probe. One huge bridge support made out of solid reinforced concrete in an oval shape was where we some how had to attach this probe. Our day started by putting together all of the parts to make this probe. This included a solar panel, a radio transmitter, the probe it self, a pipe to hold the probe in place and many other components. This probe weighed about 50 pounds so this was extremely hard to get in the water as you can imagine. Seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to an hour and still no probe deployed. It was my idea to hoist the probe into the air from the rafters of the railroad tracks. It is then when we finally got it to stay.

Inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS). This machine measures very small amounts of the purest elements in water samples in the parts per billion. The plasma part is a heated element almost like an oven but only a little hotter, this plasma reaches a sizzling temperature of 10,000 degrees which is the same as the shell of the sun. The concentration I was testing for was around 8 to 15 parts per billion and the type of element was Copper known as CU. Now to put this in perspective, the water we drink everyday has a little over 300 ppb of CU. Now you might ask how does this machine work? First the water sample comes through a tube and mixes with a gas caller Argon, this then turns the water into an aerosol, which shoots through these cones. Along the way the aerosol breaks down into tiny particles called ions. These ions then hit the MS part of the machine called the Mass Spectroscopy and this measures the ions. Each sample is taken and then plotted in a file on a computer where the user can read the data.

When I hear that someone is working in a lab I think of someone mixing chemicals and explosions. In the lab at SpaWar this was not the case unfortunately. The lab is one large room with a smaller room inside of it called the clean room. This is known as the “particle free room”. The lab has fume hoods, which are mainly where chemicals are to be mixed. The fume hood at SpaWar has many different instruments on it, some of which I have no clue what they do. In the lab I learned many different ways of sampling water and creating chemicals to test the water. I learned that when conducting work in a lab every measurement counts, I think of it like baking, all the measurements have to be precise or else the cake doesn’t rise.

Chemicals are very fun to play with. In second grade we built the volcanoes and but baking powder vinegar and red food coloring in to watch the lava flow out. Well this happens to be a chemical reaction. Chemical reactions can be big and explosive, or they can be cold and icy. Unfortunately I did not experience any of these when I was working with chemicals at SpaWar. Doing work with chemicals here consisted of putting on a white “hazmat” suit and going in a clean room and digging chemicals out of jars with a metal spoon. Now this was not as easy as it sounds. First off it was like trying to dig up cement with a spoon, the chemicals were so hard and compact that it was almost impossible to get them out. After I finally broke everything up there was this white residue that would fall off the spoon onto my gloves. Now before all this started my mentor told me that none of these were harmful and that I didn’t need gloves. I believed him until I got some of this white residue on my hand and it started burning me. Now as you can imagine this would be quite a shock, someone tells you that it is not harmful and you get it on your flesh and it starts burning right away and it feels like some has put a match out on your hand. So from that point on I wore gloves when working with chemicals.