The study of groundwater was pretty much “out of sight, out of mind’’ when James J. Geraghty began plying the field in the 1950s. Few schools offered courses, let alone degree programs. Even after forming a successful engineering partnership with David W. Miller and pioneering the study and practice of groundwater geology and contaminant flow, Geraghty once admitted that the much-ignored niche still “bored everybody” in his firm.
Geraghty, former chairman of Syosset, N.Y., consulting firm Geraghty & Miller, who co-wrote some of the field’s defining guidelines and texts, died May 14 of pneumonia in The Villages, Fla. He was 90.