Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–97
U.S. independent of foreign natural gas probably for a very long time, but that’s what came out
of that project.
There were many other projects of different sorts. There was stuff on improving the
resolution on seismic profiling out in the North Sea. There was stuff on measuring porosity of
oil saturation of stuff, probably also in the North Sea, with Elf. Projects like these are great.
They give a touch of reality to research. They give a touch of advertising, as in “You like it?
Hey, we can put that thing in production.” We had engineered something called a dipole sonic
tool, basically setting up shear waves in the soft formations, which propagate more slowly than
the compression waves. Before that, everybody had been doing basically compressional waves
sonic, where basically you have a sound source in a well. The waves go out, and if they hit the
right structures, they come back into receivers, also in the well. You get much higher resolution
close to the well. The shear thing allowed us to work in some formations in the Gulf Coast
where other kinds of techniques did not work well. There was a lot of that kind of thing. And
remember, these projects had been contracts. The previous director had gotten himself into a
financial hole, which was not entirely his fault. It was his fault that he didn’t practice triage and
kill off a bunch of essentially extraneous projects, because when you have a contract with, say,
an oil company or companies, you damn well better fulfill that contract. I discovered there were
about three of these contracted projects where people were making no forward progress, and we
just had to kill a lot of other stuff to make sure those things got finished.
ASPATURIAN: How did you determine what should stay and what should go? I mean, it sounds
as if you were expected to do it very fast.
TOMBRELLO: Well, it wasn’t that fast. I started the negotiations on the job sometime in the
spring of ’87, and I wasn’t going to take over until June 1. The guy who was going to be my
boss basically said, “There is a secretary there—an assistant—who will give you anything you
ask for. Her name is Bari Ross Perlman.” I knew her because I had been working forty days a
year in the lab for several years as a consultant. She just sent me everything. I read very fast,
and I got through a lot of material. I just read pounds, all kinds of stuff. I said to Stephanie,
“You know, I need to know more about her, because she is the odds-on choice to be my assistant
when I go there, but I don’t know anything about her.” Stephanie says, “If she’s as good as you
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