Our town’s Mimi Garstang may be winding down a 29-year under-the-radar career in geology, but, as an article in Monday’s (7/14/08) St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out, the director of the Missouri Department of  Natural Resources (DNR)’ Division of Geology and Land Survey has been at the forefront of some of Missouri’s biggest environmental problems.
The story about Garstang appeared as part of a regular Post-Dispatch feature entitled Under the Micrcoscope, “Retiring state geologist had role in Times Beach, Weldon Spring cleanups.”
As the Post-Dispatch said, Garstang, 57, “was one of the first people to tackle the problems at Times Beach in the mid-1980s when the town (about an hour east of Rolla on Interstate 44) was evacuated due to the discovery of harmful dioxins in the soil. In that same decade, she was part of a team in charge of cleaning up the radioactive uranium contaminating Weldon Spring. She is also one of just a handful of women state geologists in the United States.”
Regarding Times Beach, Garstang told the Post-Dispatch it was a career highlight for her to see what happened in Times Beach develop from a “very sad situation where people were evacuated from their homes to the point where that same piece of property is now a safe state park for people to use and enjoy.”
Regarding the role of geologists at Weldon Spring, Garstang said geologists were brought in to characterize what was radioactive, where the contamination was and if it affected people’s water supplies. “We then cleaned it up and safely deposited it in a disposal cell, a landfill for radioactive materials. Now, people can walk up on top of an 80-foot landfill and get a perspective on a very important part of history; it’s where they enriched uranium ore for the atomic bomb.”
Garstang was also involved in the aftermath following the Taum Sauk Reservoir failure in 2005.
Regarding women going into science-related fields, Garstang said as a member of the state geologist registration board she sees a lot more women coming through the system. “But the numbers of people going into the sciences in general are low, and we need to encourage our youngsters to consider science as a career.”
Regarding a current earthquake hazards mapping project in the St. Louis area under Garstang’s DNR division, Garstang said “I think we are going to determine that around 25 percent of the St. Louis area is at high risk for an earthquake.”