Richard L. Meehan

Richard Meehan has engineering degrees from M.I.T. and Imperial college, University of London. Following service with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers he began designing dams and levees in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s, and then in the Western U.S. and South America. He has maintained a consulting engineering practice in Palo Alto and taught at Stanford University for the past twenty five years.

701 Welch Rd. #1120
Palo Alto Ca 94304
415-323-0525
meehan@blume.stanford.edu

Specialties:

• Analysis of civil engineering failures, particularly those involving geophysical processes (earthquake, flood, subsidence, landslides) and groundwater seepage and pollution.
• Soil mechanics; ground stability and subsidence; applied fluvial geomorphology; hydrogeology; earthquake engineering.
• Prehistory and fate of urban infrastructure in lower river valleys
• Professional, legal, and ethical problems in engineering.

Background:

• U.S. Army 1961-1963;
• Construction Engineer, Royal Irrigation Department of Thailand, 1963-1965;
• Geotechnical Engineer, Boston and Palo Alto, 1963-1968;
• President, Earth Sciences Associates, Palo Alto 1969-1985;
• Consultant in engineering failure analysis, geophysical disasters, 1985-Present;
  Partner, Richard Meehan Associates
• Adjunct professor at tanford since 1970s. Freshman advisor, Peters Seminar instructor.
• Author, The Atom and the Fault, MIT Press, 1985 (technical and scientific issues of siting nuclear power plants in earthquake country); Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering Life, MIT Press, 1980 (collected stories on expatriate life in Thailand and Chile in the 1960s.)

Testimony of the Oaks (Paper presented at Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological and Astronomical Perspectives. A conference at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge 11th-13th July 1997)

Book Reviews That I Sent To My Mother

Web Project on Geotechnical Failures

Courses taught:

• AES 114: Engineering Geology of Quaternary Sediments
• AES 118: Geotechnical Practice
• CE 294: Geotechnical Failures
• STS 180: Dispute Resolution