Senior Environmental Specialist Courtney VanderSchaaf helps save rivers – and dogs

Some Mississippi Power employees work at a computer, others take payments and some have an office up in a bucket truck.

Senior Environmental Specialist Courtney VanderSchaaf spends a lot of her days monitoring water quality for the company and cleaning coastal tributaries with the Renew Our Rivers program.

VanderSchaaf studied biological sciences and microbiology at Mississippi State University. She now works to assure Mississippi Power’s compliance with the Clean Water Act by procuring and maintaining required permits, monitoring, compliance reporting and employee training.  She is also one of the company liaisons with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and provides subject matter expertise for the company’s generating facilities.

“The growth of this field over the past 20 years has proven to me that it is an evolving job, one that I continue to feel challenged in,” VanderSchaaf said.

Last year, VanderSchaaf was a coordinator for the Renew Our Rivers program. The 2015 program boasted more than 500 volunteers and removed 21 tons of debris from our local waterways.

Aside from being passionate about the environment, VanderSchaaf is also an avid dog lover. When she was a younger, she jumped into a bayou to save a poodle that was drowning, even though she also could not swim.

VanderSchaaf spends her time with Libby, her beloved Rhodesian Ridgeback. She rescued Libby from a busy intersection on her way to work one day. Libby, at the time, was only a few months old and very scared, but now lives happily ever after with VanderSchaaf and loves riding shotgun on road trips. Together, the two have been across the country to places as far away as Chicago and Daytona Beach.