The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection said it corrected a backend process that caused the site-cleanup data portal's "regulatory status" field to appear blank for much of the day and will perform a full data refresh beginning at 8 p.m. Friday.

The portal's regulatory-status field, which tracks where a Report Tracking Number (RTN) stands in the Massachusetts Contingency Plan process, was populating late in the day rather than updating continuously. "The regulatory status was showing up blank. We identified the issue," Brian (DEP staff) said during the office-hours call. He said the agency worked with DEP's enterprise information office and EEA IT to implement a faster update process that will run daily.

Seldrin, who introduced themself as a liaison in DEP's enterprise information office, explained the technical change: "Instead of dumping all the RTNs, recalculate the regular status, they were only adding the new ones. This way, you are significantly reducing the time from, like, 4 to 12 hours of recreating data to just under a couple of minutes." Seldrin said the new process should eliminate the blank-field issue and produce daily updates late in the day.

DEP said the full data refresh required to implement the new process will start Friday at 8 p.m.; Brian and Seldrin said they expect the refresh to finish by about noon on Saturday. "We expect by 10AM on Saturday, everything should be back to normal," Seldrin said, while noting that the exact finish time can depend on available resources.

DEP asked users to report problems to the department's site-cleanup mailbox: bwc.edep@mass.gov. "If you guys see issues on searchable sites, please feel free to, don't hesitate to send an email, to bwc.edep@mass.gov," Brian said.

The agency also said it will discuss a plan for earlier warning communications when outages occur and coordinate messages with stakeholder groups such as the Licensed Site Professionals Association. Wendy (LSPA representative) offered to distribute short notices to LSPA members if DEP provides a blurb.

DEP did not report any votes or formal actions related to this item during the call.