This week on Tap Talk, we are beyond pleased to welcome two of our colleagues on our Water & Public Health team at the Illinois State Water Survey to the show: Sallie Dolan and Erin Huggett, who are the main forces behind running our Private Well Class Help Center and phone hotline. Launched in the spring of 2024, these services have assisted over 65,000 well owners in finding answers to their well questions or solutions for well problems. As Sallie and Erin discuss, our team looks forward to helping many more as the program grows and develops!
Topics Discussed
- Meet Sallie Dolan | LinkedIn
- Sallie’s Water Hero: Steve Laker, former Public Health Administrator of Vermilion County, Illinois
- Meet Erin Huggett | LinkedIn
- Erin’s Water Hero: John Snow; pioneer of modern epidemiology and germ theory who identified the source of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak
- What is the Private Well Class?
- Launching the Help Center
- Which areas of the country have used the Help Center the most?
- How has the Help Center changed the type of calls and inquiries the Private Well Class staff receive?
- The most interesting stories from callers to the hotline
- How working with the Help Center & hotline changes perspective on well owners and wells
- The role of the Help Center in the Private Well Class relationship with the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP)
- The value of the Help Center to our program and to well owners
- Connect with the Private Well Class
“That feels really good, to know that we are individually affecting people. But for every person that we have helped get clean water, I know there are so many more that don’t even know about us.
We’ve really only scratched the surface on this.”Erin Huggett
Go Further
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About the Guests
Sallie Dolan is an environmental public health specialist with the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Since joining the Water & Public Health team in August 2023, she has assisted The Private Well Class by preparing technical documents, serving as a content specialist, and contributing to the building of a private well knowledge base. She holds an Illinois Environmental Health Practitioner license and is a Registered Sanitarian/Registered Environmental Health Specialist (RS/REHS) with the National Environmental Health Association. Sallie received a B.S. in Zoology from Southern Illinois University. She has also worked as an environmental health practitioner at a local health department; and co-owned a geotechnical, environmental, and research drilling company. Sallie began pursuing her Ph.D. in Community Health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2025.
Erin Huggett is a scientific specialist at the Illinois State Water Survey, where she began working with the Private Well Class in May of 2024. She assists with the Private Well Class Help Center and hotline, presents webinars, and participates in outreach work at many yearly events around Illinois. She holds a B.S. in Hydrogeology and Environmental Sciences from Western Michigan University, and an M.E.S. in Hydrology and Water Security from the University of Oklahoma. Erin has also worked for the Illinois State Geological Survey on state mapping projects, for the Michigan Geological Survey on the use of well log data for PFAS risk mapping, and for the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center conducting PFAS removal research.