USD Magazine, Summer 2003

ALMANAC

From Space Shuttle to Anthrax,Alum Cleanses Environment by Cecilia Chan J ust yards from an oil well blowout, Robert Wise '87 monicors a hand-held analyzer and measures elevations of hydrocarbons in the air, which reeks with the pungent odor of petroleum. Four days earlier, rhe well went our of control, spitting hot oil 10 feet inro the air, staining rhe earth black and forcing evacuation of busi– nesses in an industrial area of El Segundo, southwest of Los Angeles. "The danger is vapors from the oil," says Wise, who works for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "In a worst-case scenario, there's a danger of fire." Danger is nothing new for the 38-year-old Wise, who in February helped recover debris from the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, and in 2001 responded to the anthrax scare in Washington, D.C. In rhe nation's capital, Wise, outfitted in protective clothing and a gas mask, went into congressional buildings and the Supreme Court to rest for anthrax contamination.

"I was nervous the first rime I went in," recalls Wise, who at the rime worked for the Superfund Technical Assessment and Response Team, contracted by the EPA for hazardous material responses. "There was contamination there, bur what you saw on CNN is what we knew. All we knew was to go and sample these particular places." Last December, Wise joined rhe EPA as one of two on-sire coordina– tors based in Sourhern California. He oversees toxic cleanups and orher emergencies from Kern County, north of Los Angeles, to rhe U.S.– Mexico border. When he's nor doing paperwork in his office, Wise is giving and receiving training, checking on rhe cleanup of contaminated sires or responding to accidents such as rhe Columbia explosion. Two days after the Feb. 1 shuttle tragedy, Wise was deployed to Texas as an operations chief for one of four command posts directing ground searches for shuttle debris. "People wanted to go out and do their job and get as much material recovered as possible," says Wise, who went out with search reams when extra hands were needed. "The NASA people were amazing. What would look like a piece of burnt-out scrap material to us, they could tell exactly what part of the shuttle it came from. " Wise, who isn't permitted to specifically identify what was recov– ered, says rhe size of materials found ranged from less than an inch to 8 feet in diameter. Although rhe fuel used on a shuttle is "pretty

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