James “Buck” Buckhahn Class of 1973

I was hired through an on-campus interview by Soil Testing Services of Iowa which later changed its name to Terracon Consultants.   I worked for them for almost 36 years.   29 years in the Quad Cities then the remaining years in Omaha, Ne.   I started as a field technician doing all kinds of material testing and worked on a soil boring rig collecting soil samples for foundation design work.   I worked my way up to Department Manager and later switched into environmental services, mainly working with leaking underground storage tanks, designing, building, and operating groundwater remediation systems.    In 2008, I retired from Terracon and secular work and became a fulltime United Methodist Pastor.  Currently, I service 5 churches in south central Iowa.

In my free time I like ride my Motorcycle with my wife Laurie (she has her own bike), and play Golf.

In my early days with Terracon our materials lab worked on some of the earliest prototypes of rubberized asphalt,  all kinds of specialized concrete mixes, the use of fly-ash in soil stabilization, our company was one of the early users of nuclear density meters to perform soil compaction testing,  help drill soil borings to depths of 350 feet for a proposed nuclear power plant in Iowa, designed-built-and operated some of the first remotely operated/monitored groundwater remediation systems in the middle America.