Kathy Lester spends her days outdoors digging around in the dirt and checking out ground water.
When she’s not outdoors, Lester, a geologist and successful business owner, mans high-tech equipment and manages her business from an elegantly appointed office in Oak Harbor.
Lester is one of the contractors working on the multi-million dollar Superfund environmental clean-up at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.
It’s hard to believe a decade ago, Lester was a welfare mom.
A single mother, Lester found herself in dire straits when she got injured and lost her job as a thoroughbred racehorse groomer. She and her daughter, then only about seven years old, lived in a trailer house with no electricity. Her only source of income was welfare.
Bound and determined to make life better for her daughter and herself, Lester went to college. She first attended Skagit Valley College and then Western Washington University. Times were tough as she had to remain on welfare in order to keep working toward a brighter future.. Meanwhile, she was raising her daughte, and, eventually, caring for her mother, who became ill with cancer.
After six years of study, Lester graduated from Western Washington University in 1992, and began her career as an environmental geologist. Luckily, she says, she got a job right away in the Environmental Affairs Department at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. Life got better and easier.
After three years on the job at the base, Lester took “a leap of faith” and struck out on her own. Today, Lester owns her own business, Earthworks Environmental, located in Oak Harbor.
“A lot of this I really couldn’t have done without the good people in this community,” Lester said during an interview in her spacious office on Highway 20.
Lester now wants to give back to the community. Her company is one of three small businesses that was selected to team up with the huge, worldwide environmental clean-up company, Foster Wheeler Environmental, to work on the Superfund clean-up at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. Although her company has worked on the clean-up for about eight years, Lester was a subcontractor. Recently she was selected to partner with the big company here on Whidbey Island.
“I’d like to employ people from the community here,” Lester said.
While Foster Wheeler has the main cleanup contract, Earthworks Environmental, as a “teaming member,” will be called upon to complete any work for which it is qualified.
Right now, Lester is hoping to employ a pool of people with technical skills so that she’ll be ready when Foster Wheeler calls with work orders.
“Most of my work is dealing with cleaning up the ground water,” Lester said. “I will need people that are more in the maintenance side of things, like that can do programmable logic controls.”
Projects on the naval air station aren’t Lester’s only work. Earthworks Environmental has civilian clients as well.
“We do a lot of other stuff, too. Just about any kind of environmental work,” Lester said.
Lester’s daughter is now grown and lives in another state. Lester married, and she and her husband live in Oak Harbor with their two great Danes and one dachshund.
Looking back over the years, even Lester is amazed she managed to go from a poverty-stricken welfare mother to the owner of a company with multi-million dollar contracts. While she is amazed, she’s not surprised.
“It’s just having a goal and going for it,” Lester said. “I think the one thing I learned is ‘knowledge is power.’ Life is just much better with an education.”
