Photo: Clark James
Mishler
“Not Just Another Pretty
Face”
Two women find success in a
male-dominated field.
By Melissa Campbell
When Sylvia Medina and Kim
Kearney flew to Washington, D.C., last year to accept the Region 10 Small
Business Administration Subcontractor of the Year award, they felt a sense of
pride, honor and maybe a little vindication.
Medina and Kearney had
opened the offices of North Wind Environmental Inc. only three years before. In
1997, Medina, North Wind’s president, established the company’s headquarters in
Idaho Falls, Idaho, while Kearney opened an office in Anchorage and took on the
role of Alaska operations manager. She now is the a vice president of business
development.
“At the time, Sylvia and I
worked for large consulting firms and both of us felt used and abused,” Kearney
said. “We felt we could do this on our own.”
The many challenges they
faced sometimes had Kearney questioning that logic. The women were penetrating
an industry dominated by men, some of whom may hold other ideas in the roles
women should play.
“There were times I thought
if we had Bubba running things we’d have gotten a job,” Kearney said. “There
have been a lot of challenges, but it’s so rewarding when you prove that you’re
not just a pretty face, that you know what you’re doing and you have qualified
people to back you up.”
Those qualified people and
their managers allowed the company to grow–North Wind now has offices in eight
Western states. The Alaska office started as a two-person operation in a log
cabin in Eagle River and has expanded to take up a good portion of the second
floor of the Red Cross building in downtown Anchorage. The 11 employees there
consist mostly of scientists and engineers with years of experience in the
field.
To further their growth,
Medina and Kearney took advantage of opportunities to help minority-owned
businesses–requirements they met on two fronts: The company is owned by women
and Medina is Hispanic.
Two years ago, North Wind
became certified with the Small Business Administration as an 8(a) contractor,
and is certified by the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public
Facilities and the Municipality of Anchorage as a Disadvantaged Business
Enterprise.
These certifications are
for small businesses owned by at least one person who can show he or she was
disadvantaged socially (because of race, gender or disability, for example) and
economically (diminished capital and credit opportunities).
The certifications have
helped the company get some work, including contracts with federal agencies,
including their biggest client, the military.
“The military has really
given us job security,” Kearney said. “There are tons of waste sites across the
state–some are minor and some are huge. Then there are some that are not fully
documented yet and there’s not enough money to go out to some of these places.”
The company has agreements
with the military to do such things as site assessments, analysis, remediation,
community relations, among other environmental work.
North Wind recently built a
remediation system at Fort Wainwright to remove petroleum contamination found
below ground that threatened the groundwater. North Wind also has contracted
with the military to take samples and do analysis work of hazardous waste sites.
In one such contract, they have to be at one of several sites–a few of which are
fairly remote–within 48 hours of getting a phone call requesting their service.
Alaska has no shortage of
environmental cleanup work, and the military is not the only responsible party.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, hired North Wind to conduct a
site assessment at a former pentachlorophenol (PCP) wood treatment facility on
the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Several drums were found during the work,
which North Wind workers removed and then cleaned contaminated soils from the
site.
It’s not all dirty work;
some of what they do is prevention. The Alaska Army National Guard holds
training exercises in the Stewart River area, located near Nome. To help
evaluate the how the exercises affect the land, the Guard tasked North Wind
scientists to identify and document the flora in the area and to determine if
any endangered species are present. The company will return to the area in the
spring to conduct a similar study on the nesting and migration habits of birds
in the area.
North Wind also conducts
historical significance surveys. In work required under the National Historic
Preservation Act, North Wind explored and documented the history of former
Federal Aviation Administration buildings in Farewell and Tanana.
Sometimes the environmental
work can become a study of the Alaska Native culture. When North Wind scientists
were conducting an environmental impact statement for the Red Dog Mine dock
extension, they had to consider the impact on the subsistence foods used by the
surrounding residents, said Jennifer Karsner, an environmental scientist at
North Wind.
“It can be difficult to
piece out the science in respect with local opinion and local knowledge,”
Karsner said. “And later, presenting the issue to the public can be challenging
because of the cross-cultural aspects.”
North Wind also works for
individuals, including remediation efforts in both urban and rural areas where
fuel storage tanks have leaked and oil was spilled.
The work has been tough,
Kearney said, but it has been rewarding, too. And their efforts have not gone
unnoticed. In its four years of operations, North Wind Environmental has earned
several awards, including the Small Business Administration’s 2001
Administrator’s Award of Excellence, and the 1999 awards of Small Business of
the Year and the Small Business Subcontractor of the Year given by Bechtel’s BWX
Technologies, an environmental firm.
“We were a young company
and to gain that kind of recognition for those things was exciting,” Kearney
said. “It makes it all worthwhile.”
