Inventor of Tanknology’s VacuTect tank testing system dies at 99

The man who started it all for Tanknology has passed away. At age 99, Thomas Edwin (Ed) Adams, a lifelong Canadian, died Dec. 27 in Edmonton.

Ed invented our VacuTect® volumetric tank testing system, the primary method we use for the testing of underground fuel storage tanks (USTs), and the most popular approach to UST testing in the world.

 

Ed lived a varied and extraordinary 99 years. In addition to his foray into UST testing, he enlisted in the Canadian military during World War II, serving as an aerospace maintenance engineer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He received a special citation for his development of a method of training pilots in the safety of daylight hours to fly in blind flying conditions.

It was following his military service that Ed started a company, Dominion Instruments, which ultimately led him into the oil service industry. His company serviced a wide variety of industrial devices. During the Polio epidemic of the 1950s, he developed a safety-monitoring device for iron lungs. In the 1960s he developed pipeline transfer instrumentation and approaches to environmental monitoring.

In 1976 Ed founded Athabasca Research Corp, where he developed the VacuTect process, the UST leak detection system that Tanknology and our licensees around the world utilize to this day.

Ed’s tank testing business spawned a division of Athabasca, which he named Tanknology. The Tanknology of today acquired that division and all of its assets and patents, from Athabasca in 1986 to found the current company in the U.S. in Austin, Texas in 1988.

Here at the end of Ed's amazing life, all of us at Tanknology salute the inventor of our primary technology. We have been fortunate to make his creation the most utilized tank testing system in the world, a fact we know made him proud. We send our heartfelt condolences to Ed’s large family in Canada.

You can read Ed's complete obituary here.