As a Oregon Sea Grant Natural Resource Policy Fellow, I work with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to help develop their storm water monitoring program. The folks at ODEQ develop monitoring and management plans of pollutants that enter Oregon’s aquatic, atmospheric, and terrestrial environments. I have been working with the water quality permitting section of ODEQ, which sounds pretty technical but in reality its simply a group of people who issue permits to municipalities, construction and industrial enterprises, and other agencies who would otherwise discharge pollutants or toxins into Oregon waterways unabated. Water quality permitting is an entirely new area for me, as my primary interests and focus have been in marine ecology, but I always love to grow and learn new things.

So far, I have worked with DEQ and Oregon municipalities to assemble past and current stormwater data and give an assessment of data collection efforts. The issue is that with limited resources DEQ cannot tackle the mountain of annual reports and data that municipalities have been collecting, and both parties have raised concerns about whether their data has or will inform management decisions. This is a huge deal for not only the permittee and DEQ, but also the people of Oregon who deserve to know the condition of their waterways. I will be writing a report that will be finalized around March to present my findings. Hopefully this report will be useful for future data collection and retention in the future and will help inform permit decisions.

Around March I will be segueing into another project focusing on data collection and monitoring of stormwater in industrial and construction sites in the Port of Portland as well as the entire state. This will be similar to the previous project, but will be shorter in scope. Primarily, I will be focusing on data from runoff of heavy metal and pesticides.

There is no shortage of work to be had at DEQ. There are mountains of annual reports and hundreds of Microsoft Access files (I had assumed everyone used Excel, so I had to learn this). Its very dense permitting and policy language, but I am happy when I get to work with data. I feel good about the project and I am learning something completely new.

More to come!
Joey