[Water_news] 4. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATER QUALITY - 7/7/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

July 7, 2008

 

4. Water Quality –

 

 

New lab to safeguard water supply: VALLEY DISTRICT OPENS $17 MILLION FACILITY

San Jose Mercury News- 7/6/08

By Paul Rogers

It was a like a scene from the "CSI" television show. Seven children in San Jose were seriously ill. Public health officials scrambled for clues.

 

"In interviewing the families, it seemed like everybody mentioned that they had been in or near the fountain downtown at Plaza de Cesar Chavez," said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County's public health officer. "We wondered: What else did they do? Was there a food vendor out there? Was there a breach in a drinking fountain?"

 

He called in chemists from the Santa Clara Valley Water District to hunt for answers. The chemists, in turn, used high-tech equipment to track down a microscopic parasite that likely came from leaking diapers of babies playing in the water.

 

Two years later, the fountain has new filters and a no-diaper rule. And the water district has a new tool to continue safeguarding the valley's water: a $17 million lab.

 

The new facility, which opened this spring at the water district's Almaden Valley headquarters, replaces a lab in Los Gatos that was built in 1968 and had become so cramped that scientists were working in double-wide trailers.

 

The new water quality lab is the canary in the coal mine for the drinking water supply of 1.7 million people in Santa Clara County. Its 16 chemists and microbiologists conduct 138,000 water tests a year, sampling water as it comes into the district's three drinking water treatment plants from underground wells and San Francisco Bay's delta, and again as it goes out to taps across Silicon Valley.

 

"I don't drink bottled water. I feel very confident there is no need," said a smiling Jim Scott, the district's lab and environmental service manager.

 

Scott's staff tests for roughly 300 contaminants, ranging from pesticides and gasoline additives to heavy metals like lead, mercury and arsenic, to viruses and bacteria.

 

The new facility, among the most advanced drinking water labs in the nation, is built to never stop running. To withstand a major earthquake, it was constructed on 220 pilings, each driven 40 feet into the ground. To carry on through blackouts, it has a safety net of emergency generators and batteries. It is ringed by TV cameras and security doors.

 

Water quality isn't sexy. But knowing that you won't get sick when you take a drink is among the most vital public health issues in the world, Fenstersheib said.

 

"Most of us certainly take for granted that when we turn on the tap, we have clean water to drink," he said. "These labs are really important. They are the first line of defense."

 

Every year, according to the World Health Organization, roughly 1.8 million people die from waterborne diseases such as dysentery and cholera. Most are children under age 5 who live in slums and rural areas of developing nations in Africa, South America and Asia that lack the kinds of basic drinking water treatment and sanitation facilities that America had 50 years ago.

 

Waterborne diseases were common in the United States in the 1800s and early 1900s before U.S. cities embraced basic water treatment with filters and chlorine.

 

Even today, risks remain.

 

An outbreak of cryptosporidium - the same microscope parasite that made the San Jose children ill in 2006 - was responsible for more than 100 deaths in Milwaukee in 1993, mostly among the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. It caused roughly 400,000 other residents in the area to become ill with fever, diarrhea and dehydration.

 

Scott said the new water lab will allow the district to meet ever-tightening state and federal water quality laws. The building is packed with devices like mass spectrometers - which measure the mass of atoms - and gas chromatographs - which separate chemicals in complex samples.

 

Because the South Bay's drinking water supply is tested dozens of times a day, an act of terrorist sabotage to poison it would be difficult to pull off. And if levels of concern are found, the drinking water plants can immediately be recalibrated to remove contaminants.

 

Although the lab has worked on cases from polluted fountains to measuring the now-banned gasoline additive MTBE in local reservoirs (which led to a ban on power boats there until 2004), one thing it doesn't regularly test for yet are the minute levels of pharmaceuticals that have turned up in water supplies nationwide.

 

The substances range from Advil to hormones found in birth control pills. They are believed to pass in parts-per-billion concentrations through sewage into rivers and bays. There is no conclusive research that shows they pose a health risk, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying the science and may one day set drinking water levels for them.

 

Scott thinks that might take three to five years. Until then, he and his co-workers in white lab coats test, test and test, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for dozens of pollutants researchers know for sure are bad news.

 

"Data is information," he said. "And the information that comes off these instruments is directly tied to public health."#

http://www.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_9800476