Mention Earth Day, and DEQ’s Sarah Idczak thinks back to her days as an undergrad at Western Washington University.
“The environmental college hosted an Annual Earth Day Festival. There were live bands, great food and lots of dancing. It was a great chance to take a step back from all the environmental problems we were studying and celebrate the victories,” says Idczak. “It allowed us to take a breath and just celebrate this big, beautiful blue marble that we all get to call home.
Current information about DEQ’s response efforts in Monmouth, where gasoline leaked into the sewer system and caused gasoline vapors to enter several buildings on Main Street.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has released the 2020 Oregon Water Quality Index. The index assesses water quality at 160 ambient monitoring stations across the state.
The Willamette Cove Upland cleanup plan protects human health and the environment.
As Women’s History Month comes to a close, Oregon DEQ wants to honor and celebrate the many women in our agency, who work tirelessly to restore, maintain and enhance our state’s air, land and water. Their hard work, expertise and lived experiences provide unique perspectives and contributions to our mission. Over the last month, weContinue reading “Women on the Move at DEQ”
I’ve pursued paths that, while they weren’t unheard of for women, women were definitely in the minority. My undergraduate degree is in civil engineering—a time when women made up about 10% of the students in my degree program. That was the highest percentage among the all the engineering fields of study at the time.
Massive hills of pinkish red rock stand along a lonely dirt road in far southeastern Oregon. The problem? They’re toxic.
The Beaverton School District and Portland General Electric have partnered to bring the first two electric school buses to Oregon. Each vehicle will cut about 52,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. That means students, drivers and neighborhoods will breathe cleaner air and overall air quality will improve.
Across the state, students are beginning to head back to in-person schooling, and that means more and more school buses are returning to the roads. As such, Oregon DEQ is working to make that transportation cleaner and safer for those children and the environment.
From the extraordinary pandemic to the intruding smoke from massive wildfires, 2020 presented Oregon DEQ’s vehicle testing inspectors with demands they had never before encountered.
