FRANKLIN, TN — Garver’s Water Team continues to grow with the addition of Rick Forehand as Wastewater Modeling & Planning Technical Practice Leader.
Based in Garver’s Franklin, Tennessee, office, Forehand will work on high-level master plans for communities, evaluating systems, highlighting key challenges, and making long-term plans to address them.
“It’s an exciting time for the WI-MAP Team, and for Garver as a whole. Even more so now that Rick is on board,” WI-MAP Practice Area Leader Ian Toohey said. “He’s a great fit in every way. His extensive experience in wastewater modeling and master planning throughout the Southeast — combined with his approach to analytics, his ability to present data in a clear, actionable, manner — are invaluable assets.”
At his previous firm, Forehand conducted wastewater modeling master planning for several different types of systems throughout the Southeast. He said he is now looking forward to taking on a larger role at Garver with its team of WI-MAP specialists.
Forehand attended Lipscomb University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering applied mathematics with the idea of becoming a civil structural engineer. Participating in several student-led projects in Honduras and Guatemala focused on clean drinking water, sanitary waste disposal, and infrastructure development changed that.
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“It broadened my worldview and offered opportunities to solve real-world problems,” Forehand said. “No matter where you are, everybody needs water. It’s a great industry to be in.”
He went on to earn a Master of Science in civil engineering from the University of Alabama. After working a major consent order program in Dothan, Alabama, things clicked, and Forehand found his flow in modeling and master planning. He started working on master plans and consent programs throughout the region, which exposed him to a lot of different kinds of plans.
Forehand realized what a significant role computing played, not just as a tool to crunch numbers, but as a critical part of organizing data, and he has since built different kinds of custom tools to support that effort.
“How do we work with data sets that are this big? What kind of insights can we grab from them? How do we talk about them? How do we show them? These were the questions that interested me,” Forehand said.
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So, he went back to school and earned his Master of Science in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Forehand took a job with a civil engineering firm where he remained for 12 years until joining Garver.
“There are a lot of exciting things going on at Garver, and the WI-MAP Team is one of them," Toohey said. "There's incredible opportunity there.”
