Project Description
John Forrest, P.E. is the President and Owner of Fortech, Inc. I have a wonderful supportive family with three grown children: the oldest is a Linguistics professor at the University of Georgia, our middle child is an industrial chemist in the Raleigh NC area, and our youngest is Benefits Outreach Coordinator at a large food bank in eastern NC.
I attended North Carolina State University and studied Industrial Engineering. Twenty plus years after attending NC State, I took and passed the North Carolina Professional Engineering exam as a Controls Engineer. There were several hundred taking the examination at the same time and I will confidently say I was the only person who came in with a calculator and several slide rules. My first employment after college was with IMO pump as the assembly and test floor engineer. I left IMO and started FORTECH in 1986 to supply custom control systems and field service for a variety of industries. After several years we decided to focus on the water and wastewater markets with specific representative partnerships which has been the best business decision we could have made. Within this realm, Fortech has grown to an industry-recognized system integrator and engineering support firm. I am active in the North Carolina Rural Water Association, North Carolina Water Operators Association, and NC AWWA-WEA presenting papers and teaching classes on SCADA, variable frequency drives, and instrumentation.