Contributed by Sherry Scaggiari

Sherry Scaggiari is the Water Quality Compliance Coordinator for the City of Brighton. Her chemistry degree afforded her a start as an elementary education teacher. She quickly moved on and has over 17 years in water and wastewater laboratories, regulations, and prior experience in commercial labs. In the end, she still gets to teach regularly through the RMWEA Operator Schools. Sherry is the current Chair for SPCURE, participates in CWUC, LPC, and of course, RMWQAA.

Analysts are so adaptable.  We can pivot and change directions in a split second. Want proof? Well, you should have been at the 2025 Symposium April 18. There we were, listening to some great presentations.

More on that in a minute…

It was break time, time to visit with all of the vendors. When suddenly…the power went out…pitch black conference room!

But here’s the thing, we all just said, hey it’s dark and essentially picked up the conversations we were having from the same point, didn’t miss a beat. Resilient bunch we are.

Behind the scenes, Xcel was consulted, and it was found that the power could be off essentially for the rest of the symposium.

Now, there was still business to be done. So, Adele gathered everyone in the atrium area where, since there were skylights, we could basically see.

Then on to the business of the organization – which was doing the raffle drawings, of course. Lots of people won a gift card of some sort and we are thankful for the vendors who provided them.

I think the power came on about this time, but we had a little more business to do, but lunch was also ready – even though we were all still fairly full from breakfast. OH! Did I mention the BACON? WOW! Best bacon ever! I mean really, it was not that normal soggy, limp bacon you normally get in a breakfast buffet. It was crisp and tasty and amazing! Sorry, I got distracted from that memory! So, we took an important vote – lunch now or after some other business…and the vote was lunch!

Once we got done stuffing ourselves, again, and the power was on…but alas…the video set up wouldn’t boot up. Again, let’s pivot! Let’s do some announcements of award winners!

The people who received the scholarships were announced – Eva Anderson and Guillermo Vizarreta-Luna and the coveted Analyst of the Year was announced – Danny McCausland! Congratulations!

So, the venue brought in a giant screen TV and we used that for the presentations. 

They were all fantastic and very interesting. Here’s a run down of them:

The Powerful Toll of Internal Auditing at SPR’s Wastewater Laboratory
Seirra Potter and Adele Rucker, SPR

From Pandemic Response to Public Health Monitoring
Abby Wharton, CDPHE

Improving Recycling in the Laboratory
Lauren Hervert, Colorado Analytical Labs

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Novel Techniques in PFAS Monitoring
Kat Remmerde, Metrohm

From a Lab of Drab to a Lab of Fab: Implementing Continuous Improvement
Melisande Madsen and Muzit Kiflai, Metro Water Recovery

The vendors were great. We had over 10 show off their products or testing.

South Platte Sally presented a poster on the history of RMWQAA! She was great and so informative! It was fun to see our history. Thanks to Michelle Neilson for helping Sally!

Yes, you CAN! We gathered names for various positions the board would like to add. It’s great so many people said they could help in various ways! If you are interested in learning more, reach out!

If you didn’t attend, you missed a great day and should consider coming next year! If you did attend, you will always remember the great Symposium in the Dark, 2025. Networking with all of the resilient, flexible analysts across the state and learning from each other was very worth the time (And the Ba C O N – did I mention the bacon? And did you know you can spell bacon with periodic chart symbols?). Thank you to those who made the symposium happen – especially Adele – she was amazing and kept the ball rolling through all of the adversity! See you next year!