Meet the 2009 Committee Chairs

by Edited by ASHI Staff October 1, 2009

We continue to welcome the members who have volunteered to work on your behalf under the direction of the Board of Directors, supported by their committee members and Board and staff liaisons. Your president would like you to know a little more about these important people; therefore, we’ve requested that the chairs introduce themselves. Meet Bill Loden.

Bill Loden, Ethics  Committee Chair

BillLoden.jpg My career path could be characterized as an outward manifestation of Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve always had a very wide range of interests and as a child never answered the “what do you want to be when you grow up” question the same way twice. Policeman, lawyer, football player, rocket scientist, builder, engineer. The list goes on.

Chance has played a large role in bringing me to my current career in building inspections. After a number of changes in my college major, I finally decided on a degree in construction, which I completed in 1981. As luck and poor timing would have it, the economy was in recession and construction jobs were hard to find. With prior oil field experience, I landed a job as a field reservoir engineer, working on the deepest wells in the U.S. in Oklahoma and eventually working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

A collapse in oil prices in the mid 80s spelled the end of my petroleum career, so I picked up and moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where I found work as a project manager for a commercial contractor. This is when I first began dabbling in home inspections, helping friends who needed someone
to look at problems or who needed help with a purchase
decision.

For those of you who may not know, Huntsville is also known as “Rocket City USA.” Back in the 1950s, a group of rocket scientists from Germany moved to Huntsville to begin work on the military rocket program. As luck would have it, becoming a rocket scientist had been on my childhood career list, so after of couple of years in construction, I made the switch to NASA, where I went to work in Safety and Mission Assurance on the Space Shuttle program.

Though not really a rocket scientist, my first assignment was managing the problem reporting system for the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. During my first three years, I uncovered a number of systemic problems in the program, and, as a result, I received NASA’s highest award, the Silver Snoopy. The award, presented by the Astronaut Corp. at a ceremony at Marshal Space Flight Center (MSFC), was for “outstanding support that greatly enhanced flight safety.”

Over the next few years, I moved from reliability into safety and quality. I also was doing some really fun stuff such as heading the MSFC Safety Review Panel, manning the safety console during launch support and performing post-flight inspections on the solid rocket boosters at the Cape.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I eventually moved into management. Big Mistake! Dealing with bureaucrats on a daily basis will suck the life out of you, and I found little joy in the new duties. During my time at NASA, I started doing home inspections on the side as a hobby to help me cover the college tuition for my kids, and I joined ASHI in the mid-90s. By 2004, I had built up my inspection business to the point that I decided to leave NASA to focus on home inspections.

I’ve branched into commercial inspections and have added thermal imaging to my list of services. My wife, Deanna, is now getting involved and is adding equine thermal imaging to the menu. The great thing about the inspection business is that there are endless ways to diversify so you never get bored.

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Serving on a Committee

If you are interested in serving on an ASHI committee, go to ASHI.org, log in as a member and go to Members Only/Downloads and Forms/ASHI Documents and Forms. Download a PDF of the Call for Volunteers for 2010 form, choose which committee you’d like to serve on, fill it out and mail or fax it in. The form includes FAQs about serving on committees, as well as descriptions of each committee. Committees to serve on include:

Bylaws
Chapter Relations
Code of Ethics
Complaints
Education
Legislative
Membership
Public Relations
Standards of Practice
Technical

Questions? Contact Aldis Stripnieks at 847-954-3177 or aldis@ashi.org.

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