Paul Gremillion: Engineering in a Global Setting
Paul Gremillion: PhD
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
College of Engineering, Forestry, and Natural Sciences
Sabbaticals
can be more than time away; they can be an opportunity to make a lasting
difference on issues that will affect generations to come. This was certainly
true for Paul Gremillion, NAU associate professor of civil and environmental
engineering. From July 2009 to July 2011 Gremillion left the solitude of his
Bilby Research Center laboratory, where he assesses the human impact on water
systems (specifically how mercury gets into lake sediments and affects the food
web), and stepped into the multicultural, suit-wearing, fast-paced, and
high-security environment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in
Vienna, Austria. “It was as big a change as I could possibly make,” says
Gremillion. “I led a very different
life. It was exciting.”
Gremillion’s role at the IAEA
The IAEA, perhaps best known for its nuclear-weapons monitoring
activities, has a strong interest in the world’s water issues. Gremillion
joined IAEA’s small hydrology section as a technical manager to help countries,
as he says, “build their technical capacity to use their water resources in the
best way possible.” One of Gremillion’s
key accomplishments was to finalize an existing strategic action project by
overseeing the drafting and adoption of several groundbreaking documents that
will significantly affect how the Nubian Aquifer in North Africa is managed in
the future. These documents may even become blueprints for other partnerships
as countries wrestle with how to administer their own groundwater reserves.
The Nubian Aquifer, one of the oldest and largest caches of groundwater
in the world, supplies water to Egypt, Libya, Chad, and the
Sudan. When it comes to water issues,
these nations, with vastly varying histories and cultures, have different,
competing development interests; unequal access to the aquifer; and age-old
political tensions. Gremillion’s
responsibility was to help these uneasy neighbors reach a cooperative
strategy: to agree both on the technical
status of the aquifer and on a future water-management plan. “It was a
complicated issue,” Gremillion confesses, one that required sophisticated
technology, such as numerical modeling and isotopic measures. “My job was to
get all four countries to agree that these measures and the model accurately
represented how water moved through the system.” After months of hard work, which included
workshops, meetings, and close contact with each country’s official
representatives and technical experts, the four nations drafted their parts of
the plan. Based on these documents, the IAEA developed a regional report that
was to be signed by all four water ministers at a landmark event in Tripoli
[Libya] in April 2011.
Arab Spring Disrupts Negotiations
Everything seemed to be on track until Arab Spring erupted, and Egypt and
Libya each dropped out temporarily from the aquifer negotiations. The regional
meeting was cancelled. “I had no idea there would be a direct political
dimension [to my work],” notes Gremillion. Now, Gremillion wondered about
political issues, such as which government should be recognized in Libya and
whether communications could jeopardize the welfare of his colleagues. “The
human dimension is never part of the equation when you are considering where to
drill a well," says Gremillion. “It’s easy in America to take for granted
that maybe we could do things more economically, more sustainably. There is so
much more on the line in a country that is willing to go to war over access to
water. …There is an urgency to what you are doing.”
In the end, the IAEA was able to reschedule its landmark meeting, and the
regional report was adopted in November 2011—a significant achievement that
brought closure to the project. “Paul’s work epitomizes the complexity of
engineering in a global setting where competing interests must be addressed,”
says professor Bridget Bero, chair of NAU’s Department of Civil Engineering,
Construction Management and Environmental Engineering. She is proud of the
international recognition Gremillion’s assignment at the IAEA has brought to
NAU.
--Sylvia Somerville
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