About Scott Harris, PhD
Dr. Scott Harris is a Course Director and Advisory Board member of the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Education and Research Center at UNC - Chapel Hill, a guest lecturer for the Oklahoma State University Fire and Emergency Management Administration program and a Continuing Education Instructor for the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and environmental Health at the University of Utah. His experience covers over 30 years of EHS and disaster management in general industry, federal and state government, consulting and university instruction. Currently the Director of EHS Services for ALAMO1, Scott received his PhD in Environmental Science, with a specialization in Disaster and Emergency Management, from Oklahoma State University and holds degrees in Public Health and Geology from Western Kentucky University. Dr. Harris is a nationally recognized expert in preparedness and response management and a former Region 6 U.S. EPA Federal On-Scene Coordinator who held key Command and General Staff roles in nationally significant Type 1 responses including Space Shuttle Columbia, Hurricane Katrina NOLA (water search and rescue, Murphy Oil), Deepwater Horizon, Enbridge Pipeline and the 2015 USDA Avian Influenza outbreak.
Our own Dr. Scott Harris is scheduled to lead a second Environmental Disasters course for the UTSA Environmental Science program. This three-credit hour course will be taught one night per week in the Fall 2018 semester, making it available to both traditional and non-traditional students who can enroll at either the undergraduate (ES 3953) or […]
read more »
The ALAMO1 drone team was recently tasked to provide aerial documentation of a completed Superfund remediation project in east Texas. However, the day before we arrived, the area received torrential rainfall — several inches in just a few hours — putting the newly designed and constructed erosion controls and drainage systems to the test. As […]
read more »
Dr. Scott Harris will the featured speaker at the 9/21/17 Air and Waste Management Association luncheon, held at The Petroleum Club in San Antonio. Scott will present Preparing the Florida Keys for Deepwater Horizon beginning at noon. A description of the session: In response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil release, Scott was embedded with the […]
read more »
If you have been watching the news for the last several years, it’s obvious that disaster response is not going away. Events are getting larger, more complex and more expensive, as is the demand for qualified people to manage them. In May and June of 2015, I supported the USDA as Deputy Incident Commander for […]
read more »
In late 2010, I was returning from the second of two large concurrent U.S. oil spills. In another post, you read about efforts to prepare the Florida Keys for Deepwater Horizon oil, the first of the two. That spill overshadowed the second – the Enbridge Energy pipeline release. On July 25, 2010 Enbridge’s 30-inch diameter […]
read more »
On April 16th in 1947, Texas City, TX suffered the worst industrial accident in American history. It’s well documented (even video, parts one and two) how the Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate, began burning and eventually exploded, killing more than 600 including the entire Texas City Fire Department and most of the bystanders and schoolchildren there watching. After the […]
read more »