Boothbay Harbor is one of two Maine sewer districts participating in a Center for Disease Control program checking for COVID-19 in wastewater. District Superintendent Chris Higgins was contacted in mid-December about participating in a federal survey testing twice per week.

Higgins doesn’t know why Boothbay Harbor was picked, but he was glad for the invite. “I thought it was a really good idea. Nobody really knows what’s going on here other than what data comes out of the Maine CDC,” he said.

Boothbay Harbor and Rockland sewer districts are sampling twice weekly 250 milliliter wastewater samples and sending them to LuminUltra Technologies in Miami for analysis. So far, Boothbay has sent six sanples for analysis.

“We sample on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Higgins said. “But it’s a composite sample collected over 24 hours. We got a composite sampler on the influencer side, and that’s where it’s collected, so flow is proportional. If flow goes up we get more samples, and the sampler does that.”

Five other Maine sites will participate in the federal survey. A Maine Department of Health and Human Services press release reported Bethel, Wilton, Bath, Yarmouth and Guilford-Sangerville would join the survey “in a couple days.” The federal survey includes 500 treatment plants nationwide.

The program’s first phase lasts three months and focuses on trends in “the presence and concentration” of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater. Phase two lasts nine months and adds genomic sequencing to identify new variants. Data will be available at the county level in the “coming days” on the U.S. CDC COVID Data Tracker website www.covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home, according to the federal agency.

So far, Boothbay Harbor hasn’t received any data from its samples. “I haven’t heard back,” Higgins said. “I suspect data will first be sent to the National CDC, and Maine CDC, then to us ... I haven’t been told one way or another.”

There is also a second wastewater monitoring program in Maine. The Maine CDC announced last week more than a dozen sites will monitor for the virus that causes COVID-19. “This improves Maine’s ability to track the spread and tailor our state’s public health response in the face of the Omicron surge,” according to a Maine DHHS press release.

Boothbay Harbor is not participating in the Maine CDC survey.