By Julie Koerber
Photography by Phil Bell

If you want to talk trash with Barb Butler, you better be ready for a healthy dose of discussion on landfill life expectancy, hazardous waste management and methane extraction. As the Environmental Compliance Officer for the city of Billings, knowing what goes in the landfill is Barb’s job.
    You might ask, how did a nice girl from Billings end up in a place like this? She says monitoring the landfill and making sure it is in compliance every second of the day is what keeps her going. When asked about landing the job more than 13 years ago, she’ll tell you, “I’m not a religious person, but it felt like divine intervention!”
    If you look on her desk, you’ll see piles of paper identifying chemical compounds that she’ll later analyze. Her love for the science on the job could be considered genetic. Her dad was a physician and always “talked shop” at home with his family. It was contagious. But, Barb will tell you, at one family party in 1973, the road to her future became a whole lot clearer.
    “My mother was having a dinner party and there were about eight of us. The woman sitting directly across from me was just a constant yammerer.” When the talk stopped, Barb looked up. “The whole color in her face was changing and I realized she was choking.” Everyone at the table looked to her father. “This was pre-Heimlich maneuver,” Barb says. He tried to jostle the piece of steak out of the woman’s throat but when that didn’t work, “He reached up, grabbed a steak knife, wiped it on his pants and performed a tracheotomy right there on the dining room floor.” Barb pauses. “At that moment, I knew there was no way I was going to go into medicine.” She laughs and says, “I went 180 degrees and studied rocks.”  Click here to read the full story.


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