County visits. We have continued meeting in-person with both utilities that participate in wastewater surveillance in Oregon and the county public health departments in which they reside to discuss the use of wastewater surveillance data, tour local treatment plants, and promote interfacing between utility and public health staff. We have visited 13 counties to date: Lincoln, Wasco, Hood River, Deschutes, Linn, Benton, Malheur, Umatilla, Morrow, Klamath, Jackson, Josephine, and Coos Counties.  (See photos below of Medford, Klamath Falls, and Bend meetings and tours!) We have enjoyed these visits! We will send an 8-question survey to those meeting participants soon to capture feedback about the visit and wastewater surveillance data in general. We plan to visit every participating utility and county and will contact you via email to discuss dates. We look forward to meeting you!

Holiday Pause. December 23- 27, we will not be processing samples in the lab because of campus closures. If you would like to wait to send samples until the week Dec 30, we will have new results ready by January 7th.

Dr. Christine Kelly Sabbatical. Over the next 6 months, Dr. Kelly will be on sabbatical. Please direct all emails to the COE Wastewater Box at wastewater@oregonstate.edu. Thank you!

PNCWA Presentations. Last September, our wastewater surveillance team presented at the 2024 Annual Pacific Northwest Clean Water Association Conference in Boise, Idaho. We met some of our currently participating utility folks there.

Congrats to the PNCWA Oregon Awardees:

  • Treatment Operator of the Year: Roy Bradley, Bend
  • Collections Operator of the Year: David Cox, RUSA
  • Burke Award: Jacobs/City of Wilsonville WWTP

Congrats to the Ops Challenge Team Awardees:

  • Third Place: River Rangers, Clean Water Services
  • Second Place: Wizards of WAS, City of Bend
  • First Place: Poopa Troopa, Clean Water Services

Our team gave two presentations, one with a lab focus on dPCR and variant sequencing and one with a focus on communications to utilities and county public health. Below is a selection of slides from the lab-focused presentation “Digital Polymerase Chain Reaction (dPCR) and Genomic Sequencing in Wastewater Surveillance”.