Maria Story only intended to work out of a home office in Haileybury to offer environmental consulting services. Her plans had to change as she became busier and she now heads an established firm with a staff of nine.
Story Environmental is currently located in a renovated former pool hall close to the community’s waterfront in the downtown.
“I only ever intended it to be me,” she said. “But I just kept getting busier, and my brother joined me, Anthony Story, and then my husband, Ken Norman, joined me.”
Her brother has a Masters degree in hydrology, and does a lot of the firm’s watershed and hydrology work. Norman has a degree in geological engineering and does all the sub-surface work, ground water and contamination work.
“It wasn’t hard to establish ourselves here. As the business was growing, we just hired more people,” she said.
Story grew up in the area and attended high school in New Liskeard. After completing a chemical engineering degree at the University of Toronto, she worked for a company in southern Ontario for close to seven years.
After meeting her husband, the couple worked and lived across Canada before deciding to settle in Haileybury.
“It was never the goal to move back here. But you don’t appreciate what is here when you are a teenager. It is a beautiful area and I am happy to be back here,” Story said.
She also tries to hire locals, and her staff comes from communities between Kirkland Lake and North Bay.
Her administrative assistant, Beata Bradley, is a chemical engineering technologist who also does technical work such as servicing the field equipment, lab work and development work for wastewater treatment systems.
The firm has a lot of mining clients, but it also does work for industrial and municipal clients, along with private individuals.
“We work in almost all areas of environmental so we do a lot of surface and ground water monitoring and soils and air monitoring. We do compliance reporting, for the Ministry of the Environment, and a lot of clients have to do annual reports,” she said. “We prepare environmental compliance approvals and what they are is permission for a facility to discharge something to the environment.”
Story Environmental does water treatment systems and its clients include camps and parks and along with municipal ones who require much larger systems. It also designs and develops systems to treat wastewater, from industrial to municipal.
“We do remediation of contaminated sites, so if there is a former industrial facility or gas station, and the soil is contaminated from a spill, we clean up the site and make sure it meets the necessary standards and prepare a record of site condition for that site,” Story said.
The firm covers an area between Muskoka and Hearst, and from Quebec to Sudbury. It has been asked to conduct international work but it is busy focusing on its current area.
Story has a client in Sarnia, one she has maintained since she started her career.
“I still work for them on one of their big projects. It started when I left to work for a small consulting firm in Winnipeg,” she said. “A few weeks after I left, they called and said they needed me. I started working with them in 1990 and I am still working on one of their biggest environmental projects, 23 years later.
“It’s one of those projects that I am attached to since I saw it all the way from the start and to the end and now I am just doing monitoring.”
The firm has the potential to keep growing but it is hard to attract senior qualified people to the area.
“Our rates are not the same as southern Ontario, so that is a factor. People also don’t want to move here if they are not from here, and if they are really established with their careers and family.
“We are at a critical point right now where we either have to get larger, which I foresee, or I have to hire at least one other senior person to help me because I am too busy,” she said.
She encourages all high school students who are good in math and science to consider engineering.
“It is the best foundation to move on and move into almost anything. You are almost certainly guaranteed a job when you are out of university,” she said.
