With the purchase of RMC in 1984, Canberra inherited several business activities including an Ecological Group (Icthyological studies), the Emergency Medical Assistance Program (EMAP) headed by Dr. Roger Linnemann, and the Consulting and Technical services Business headed by Frazier Bronson. The latter provided mobile laboratory services, whole body counting (WBC) services, decommissioning and decontamination (D&D) services, and radiation safety services. The first two businesses were sold off within a few years but the last became the nucleus of the Canberra Services Business than grew substantially over the next few years. Lee Booth, who was Frazier’s right hand man, was active in this business long after Frazier came to Meriden as a product developer.
By the mid-1990s the company was heavily engaged in characterization studies at several sites including Rocky Flatts, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Idaho Falls, and Los Alamos. Mobile laboratories were used at Rocky Flatts to characterize bulk shipments of waste before shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad New Mexico. So called “dirt counters”, conveyer systems developed by Canberra, were used at contaminated sites in West Chicago and elsewhere. ISOCS, the In Situ measurement tool developed by Canberra, was used extensively in the field. It became routine to mix (plow) contaminated ground to disperse hot spots and thus meet criteria for maximum allowable activity.
John Tamburro was involved in managing these activities and Linda Ostrowski, who had been our mid-Atlantic sales engineer, moved to Oak Ridge took over the US Services Business when we had some 25 people on the ground there. Bruce Gillespie, who helped develop some of Canberra’s early waste assay systems, moved to the Pacific Northwest and managed a small group there providing services at Hanford and Idaho Falls.
This chapter of the History of Canberra is woefully incomplete because I failed to find help in writing it and I do not know enough about it to do a credible job. Help, anyone?