Austin Orr

water resources engineer
programmer | tinkerer

Portland, Oregon

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About

By day I build applications, develop automated workflows, and conduct data analysis regarding efficacy of our stormwater treatment facilities.

By night I spend time with my wife and dog, play music, develop websites, and build side projects.

Skills

hydrologic modeling
SWMM | RAS | GIS

Interests

graphical representation of data
typography and design
guitar and piano
web tools and development
maths

Projects

California Postsecondary to Prosperity Dashboard is a data visualization and exploration project built for California Competes, a non-profit organization focused on the connection between education and economic strength. The website and data visualization was designed and built by Clay Kilby, the founder of Creative for the People. I worked as Clay's front-end web developer to bring the maps, graphics, and charts to life using javascript and the d3 library.

nereid is an open source stormwater modeling engine developed for the Orange County Stormwater Tools (OCST) platform for Orange County, California. The platform helps the County and its multiple jurisdictions manage their inventory of stormwater BMPs and quantify their benefits. The nereid engine is deployed as a standalone web api in a docker container built on top of linux, python, uvicorn, and the fastapi framework. It's designed to compute the cumulative long-term capture performance and water quality improved by BMPs throughout the watershed, including distributed structural BMPs, regional facilities, and site-based water quality measures. The engine accumulates the impact of these management measures for each node in the watershed, and is performant enough to run on the web.

mpl-template is a tiny library (one module) which eliminates a bunch of boilerplate for creating embedded plots within a custom titleblock template. It's lightweight, easy to manipulate and adapt, and I use it all the time as an environmental engineering consultant to build whole report appendices filled with figures. Never again will I cut-and-paste an image of plot created by matplotlib into an office-suite template just to get a nice titleblock.

swmmnetwork is a library for computing water quality using EPA SWMM 5.1 input and output files. Given the washoff concentrations from each land surface in the model, the software will trace the pollutant load through the network and perform load reduction calculations at network nodes where volume losses occur, or where management practices exist that are capable of causing pollutant load reduction.

lsys is a library for creating Lindenmayer systems inspired by Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature. The graphics in that book are extraordinary, and this little tool helps make similar graphics with matplotlib.

This website was built by me so that I could start to learn javascript, web conventions, and as a place to build and host little programming toys like my re-sizable minesweeper game to help pass time on my bus/train commute. The site is developed using flask, built and served through gitlab's continuous integration, and is a fully static site. Most recently the layouts on this site have all migrated away from bootstrap in favor of css grid.

Experience

2013 - Present
Geosyntec Consultants
Engineer, P.E. (CA)
2013 Staff Engineer, 2014 Senior Staff Engineer

This position has offered me a broad set of engineering problem solving opportunities including hydraulic, hydrologic, and water quality modeling efforts across the nation. The bulk of my work has been in California where I've supported CEQA water quality impact assessments using SWMM and a Monte Carlo statistical approach to BMP effectiveness, TMDL and Regional Permit compliance for county-wide municipal compliance, and BMP sizing, specifications, and performance estimation for many types of clients including private land developers, municipal utilities, and municipalities themselves. Through this work I've developed technical skills as a user of existing industry standard tools such as SWMM and RAS and I've become very familiar with ESRI products (desktop, arcpy, and AGOL).

Education & Certifications

Professional Engineer (California)

MS Civil and Environmental Engineering, Water Resources Engineering
University of Utah 2013
Thesis: Transpiration Performance In Bioretention Systems Designed For Semiarid Climates 2013

Honors BS Civil Engineering
Minor in English Literature
University & Departmental Honors Degree Program
University of Utah 2011

Professional and Academic Presentations
Development and Application of a Multi-Scale BMP Analysis Framework for Integrated Watershed Management Planning EWRI LID 2018

Optimizing Biofiltration Media and Outlet Designs for Regional Biofiltration Facilities EWRI LID 2016