Shutout and Changeover, 23rd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Wish me luck! I'm going to try and wrap up this long story that began way back on the 20th of Midsommar with one last post on the topic. 

I had just turned 30 years old a month or two before all this happened, and a week in the Caribbean isn't considered a success to a 30-year-old unless he gets laid at least once. I was out of my league with most of the entourage - socially, economically, and probably aesthetically, to be honest. However, in addition to being a developer, Charlie also owned a chain of restaurants and there were several hostesses and waitresses down there in Antigua with him for some reason (I don't know, employee-of-the-year bonuses, maybe?) and formed a sort of "outer circle" to the entourage. Even though I was allowed to sit  at the "big-boy" table at meals, I was in the same socio-economic class as that outer circle and it was at those other tables that I had a chance at satisfying my horny ambitions. I won't go into details (this isn't that kind of blog) but suffice it to say that on my last night on the island a bottle of wine may have been ordered from the bar and charged to my room (Charlie was picking up the tab) and consumed on the beach under the light of the tropical moon. 

We returned home the next day, and the trip back was memorable for two things. First, somewhere out over the Caribbean, the pilot let Charlie take over the Lear Jet's controls for a while, and in no time, we were hot-dogging over the water, spinning around in tight loop-the-loop circles at 500 mph. It was the equivalent of burning rubber in a car lot and as good an example of a Georgia good ol' boy playing with his high-price new toy as any. Can't say I wasn't relieved when the pilot took back control of the plane.

The second thing occurred after we landed back in Atlanta. I wasn't clear on exactly what happened, but when we got to customs and immigration, the agents detained Charlie for some questions. He wasn't arrested, but he wasn't free to pass through either and he waved us all on to go home without him. This was going to take a while. I later learned that the IRS had some concerns about a solar energy enterprise in which Charlie was involved, and 60 Minutes even did a second segment on the Barbuda/New Order of Aragon story, painting Charlie and the other folks behind the proposed development with their trademark suspicion and insinuation. I think Morley Safer just wanted another trip down to Barbuda and rather than becoming employee of the month at one of Charlie's restaurants, he convinced CBS to let him file a follow-up to his original story.

Back in the office, I started to piece together everything I had gathered on the island - the rainfall records, the topographic map, the well measurements, the salinity readings, and the chloride analyses. It was all very inexact and approximate, but nevertheless I was able to develop a kind of conceptual model: 

Imagine a perfectly round island, shaped as a single, rounded, hemispherical hill, sort of like a partially submerged beach ball. The water table will be at its highest elevation above sea level beneath the highest point of this idealized island, and at the shore the water table will be exactly at sea level. Since water flows downhill, all the water above sea level must come from above, rainfall, and not the surrounding ocean. My salinity measurements and chloride analyses confirmed that the groundwater on Barbuda was fresh, not salt, water, and the rainfall records quantified how much water was entering the system. 

Now, fresh water, being less dense than salt water, "floats" on top of salty groundwater, and something called the Ghyben-Herzberg principle, named for a pair of German scientists, states that, because of the specific gravities of fresh and salt water, for every foot above sea level that the water table lies, the depth to the fresh-water/saltwater interface is 40 feet. In other words, if the water table is 10 feet above sea level at the highest point, the depth to saltwater is 400 feet, while at the coast, where the water table is at sea level, the saltwater interface will also be at sea level.  From there, it's possible to calculate the size and the volume of the freshwater lens of the hypothetical, "perfect" island.

I applied that logic to the well measurements that I took on Barbuda. The island is about 62 square miles (r = 4.5 or so miles) and I calculated the volume of the freshwater lens if the island were that perfect hemispherical shape. But since the water isn't free, like some underground lake, but occurs in the cracks, voids, and cavities of the underlying limestone bedrock, I divided the theoretical volume by published values of the porosity of limestone. Then, since the island is neither perfectly round and hardly hemispherical, I cut that second volume in half to account for all the irregularities of the coastline and the lumpy topography. 

The result was still quite a bit of water, all things considered. There was potentially enough gallons of fresh water beneath the island for the demanding, start-up phase of golf-course irrigation. However, the scant rainfall on the island wouldn't replenish the water removed, and they'd essentially be "mining" the groundwater. But, I wrote, if that remaining water were managed very carefully after startup, it might be possible to maintain a course. I added some management recommendations about drought-tolerant grass like that used in Bermuda, the high-efficiency, drip-irrigation systems the Israelis were developing, and use of infiltration basins to help the rainfall that did fall to percolate to groundwater instead of running over the rocky ground surface to the sea.

It was all very speculative and needed further study and measurement for support, I concluded, but development of a course wasn't impossible, or to put it another way, one couldn't say that there categorically wasn't enough water for golf-course implementation.

I was quite proud of myself. My office manager said all that he expected me to find was either "it's an arid, desert island unsuitable for development" or "it's a lush tropical paradise with abundant water," but not be all analytical and quantitative about it. I was still in my first couple of months with the engineering consulting firm and this was my first major project, and I felt like I had nailed it. The kid who had been told at the Geologic Survey to turn around get back on the plane to Boston had completed his first challenge.

Imagine my disappointment when Ralph, the corporate president who sponsored the project, told me my report was unusable and figuratively tore it to pieces. "You don't know what's under the ground," he insisted, but I told him that's exactly what geologists do for a living - figure out what's going on underground - and that the wells are observation points into the subsurface. 

"I don't care about no Goober-Hymen principle!," Ralph declared. "We're not releasing this report!" After I expressed my certainty that it was all based on well-established, accepted scientific principals, Ralph finally said, "If Charlie gets his hands on this report, he'll know more than we investors," and that's when I finally understood. "We investors." Ralph had a stake in the project, and as long as he knew that the water was possibly (maybe, could be, perhaps) there, his investment was sound. But as long as Charlie was uncertain, he couldn't ask the investors to chip in much more. I may have been seated at the big-boy table, but they were playing an entirely different game than I.

At Ralph's direction, the report was shortened to mere documentation of my presence down there and my measurements, but the conclusions were deleted and the recommendation was simply that further study needed to be performed. Classic consulting move - "We've studied your situation and determined that you need more studies." My real-world education of how things actually work was just beginning.

Charlie was plagued by legal and tax problems for several years and the development never took off. There's no golf course, no new sovereign nation, and as far as I know, Barbuda is still pretty much like I saw it in back in 1984, only a few more tourist attractions for day-trippers coming over from Antigua. 

Five or so years later, I bumped into Charlie at a bar in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. At first, he was cautious and defensive when I asked if it were really him ("who's asking?"), but once he realized that it was the hydrogeologist from Barbuda ("Ralph's guy"), he eased up and was most cordial. In fact, he seemed to enjoy reminiscing with a friendly witness to those times. I was sincere when I told him I really wished that it all could have worked out, and Charlie agreed, "it's was a great concept." 

Names have been changed here so I don't get sued to protect the innocent, but the person I'm calling Charlie shares a name with an all-star pro-football player, so it's difficult to Google any updates on him. All I get are sports links. Ralph has passed on but was with the company up to his very end. This old hydrogeologist, Ralph's guy, is now retired, considers himself some sort of Stoic-contemplative urban monk or something, and frequently finds himself an old man remembering the deeds of his prime.

Thanks for listening.