Les cendres de Papa seront inhumées au cimetière de Méré (Yvelines) le mercredi 29 juin à 14h. Il n’est pas possible de faire de cérémonie religieuse car les cendres ne sont pas acceptées à l’église : nous nous réunirons donc directement au cimetière.

Je serai joignable par téléphone au +33768883502 Stéphanie Souhaite

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Philippe Souhaite passed away in the early hours of Friday 6th August, alone in Guadeloupe after several years of physical suffering.

Philippe was born in 1931 and joined Wireline in 1957, retiring in 1987.

Voilà, c’est fini. Papa vient de partir, il y a un deux heures. Il a malheureusement été seul pour ce grand départ, qui met fin à plusieurs années de souffrances physiques. Je pars bien entendu en Guadeloupe dès que possible. Stéphanie

From Jean-Claude Mine: I knew Philippe at SDR Ridgefield in 1971 where he was section head, and in 1985 he was in my department at EPS in Montrouge. Philippe decided late 2015 to move to Saint Martin in the Antilles to be close to his daughter who lived there. His health condition deteriorated, unable to walk due to a knee infection, when Hurricane Irma arrived in September 2017 and his flat by the sea was destroyed. He was finally evacuated in a military plane and hospitalised in Guadeloupe, too weak for surgery. His daughter Stephanie found a medicalised house for retired people. Then covid came, and it was difficult to fly to guadeloupe. Last December she spent a week with him, found him weak and suffering a lot, with Doctors focused on pain relief. Difficult times for him and Stephanie.

Tribute from Gordon Mowat:

Philippe Souhaité was one of the great electromagnetic scientists of Schlumberger.

I worked with him, along with other stars like Jacques Leveaux, Denis Meunier, André Misk, André Poupon… in EPS Clamart 1977-1979 when I was in the first Interpretation Development group under Bernard Vivet. As a group some of us regularly departed around 11:30 on Fridays to one of a small selection of excellent restaurants within a 5km drive of Clamart for lunch – hah, lunch – we often didn’t get back to EPS ’til 15:30 or 16:00. And our intellectual output thereafter was always severely diminished, due to the copious amounts of apéritifs, vins, et digestifs, combined with the soporific effects of really good French country food. So we really only had a 4-1/2 day working week, although of course we often found ourselves with deadlines requiring some weekend catch-up.

Very good times.

After his retirement in 1985, he consulted for the Channel Tunnel construction consortium. The Tunnel was drilled for the most part through a chalky marl bed dipping down gently from the Kent coast and then gently upwards as it approached the coast of the Pas de Calais. It crosses a fair number of intersecting faults. But close to the French coast, a major tectonic event causes a very steep down-dip of this and the other layers, with an overlying chalk of later origin filling in to surface, the beginning of the Paris basin. This steep event led to a very heavily faulted and fractured zone in the overlying sediments, which was a cause of great concern to the construction, as the mechanical properties and risk of large volume water incursion through the fault & fracture network posed huge engineering risk. Philippe took all the data they collected, acoustic and electromagnetic for the most part, and 3D modelled the geomechanics and the water distribution so that the construction engineers could design the optimum drilling, water handling, and structural support programme.

These chalks and chalky marls in fact re-emerge further to the SE, on the other side of the Paris basin, and I believe with the shallower ones exposed in what makes Champagne, the deeper ones even further to the SE, making Chablis.

By pure happenstance, I chanced upon Philippe in a shopping mall in Toulon, “Grand Var”, around 2010 or 2011 or 2012, close to my home in Le Lavandou. He was already in his 80s, and looked a little frail. But we had a coffee and a good if brief conversation.

Voilà. Good memories. Good friends. Farewell Philippe.

Gordon