Honesto Roaza
I just recently learned of Chris' death from a dear friend. Chris was a brother and my colleague in the groundwater resource group in the 1990s with Tom Pratt. We were like the 3 musketeers who broke a lot technical grounds with a brand new technology called GIS and modeling back then - and we published a number of papers. The greatest complement came from our exec director who mentioned that all the other water management districts were surprised that we accomplished so much with so little resources. And Chris was a genius!!! The man was one pedantic (in a good way) tinkerer! Who would have ever thought to by-pass our GIS protocols and run AMLs overnite to get modeling results the following day. That my friends (who understand my gibberish) is pure genius. But at that time, it was exactly what we needed to complete our many never-ending projects. The singular moment when I bonded with Chris was when we were driving back from a WMD conference in south Florida and I was telling him an episode of the (then) brand new series called the X-files. We were both so spooked when we got back to the WMD parking lot very late that evening and an alarm was sounding off in Spanish that we were trespassing. Very surreal and funny. But that was the moment, we really looked at each other and "well...life's very interesting" moment passed between us. Hopefully, I'll see you again Chris in another world and another time. I'm blessed to have known you. - Ernie Roaza