December 20 2020
With 11 days to go, Portland just misses the record of no combined sewage overflows in a single year.
It turns out, 2020 had one more piece of bad news — the first sewage overflow of the year into the Willamette River on Sunday, Dec. 20.
With 11 days left in the year, the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services said the weekend storm caused a combined sewer overflow (CSO) to the Willamette River. This is the first time sewage overflow has entered the river since August 2019. It is also the first such incident to affect the entire stretch of the river in Portland since April 2018.