Herrera is working in partnership with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to establish and operate the Stormwater Technology Testing Center (STTC) in Portland, OR. The STTC is a state-of-the-art testing facility for evaluating the pollutant removal performance, maintenance requirements, and life-cycle costs of emerging stormwater treatment technologies. The STTC was constructed by ODOT in collaboration with numerous public stakeholders in Oregon and Washington. The STTC is a preapproved facility for verifying the pollutant removal performance of technologies in accordance with the Washington Department of Ecology’s Technology Assessment Protocol — Ecology (TAPE). It is also the first facility in the nation specifically designed to evaluate the maintenance requirements and life-cycle costs of treatment technologies. Stormwater used for the testing can be delivered to a technology via gravity flow or using pumps; this allows controlled testing to be performed over a wide range of flow conditions for a more thorough assessment of technology performance. The STTC has three Test Bays that are configured to allow different technologies to be rapidly installed and tested simultaneously. Stormwater used for the testing comes from 1,000 acres of highway and urban streets and has been confirmed to contain representative concentrations of common pollutants (e.g., suspended sediment, nutrients, heavy metals, oil) in urban stormwater runoff. All required equipment for testing (e.g., samplers, flow meters, weather stations, data acquisition, and telemetry) is preinstalled at the center and receives regular maintenance and calibration. Pilot studies at the facility will begin this fall leading to full operation in the spring of 2020. For more information on the STTC, please contact John Lenth.
Posted on by Melissa Buttin
