OCWD maintains a thorough groundwater protection policy that includes water quality monitoring, cleanup of contaminants, regulatory agency support, toxic residuals removal and hazardous waste management. Additionally, the District provides water quality information to regulators, other water agencies and the general public.
Photo taken August 2009, courtesy of Andre Casasola
Construction is complete of OCWD's Advanced Water Quality Assurance Laboratory at its Fountain Valley campus. The two-story steel framed building houses chemists and lab technicians, water quality monitoring personnel and all the equipment needed to do more than 350,000 analyses of approximately 18,000 water samples taken each year. The new laboratory also supports the water quality testing requirements for the Groundwater Replenishment (GWR) System – the largest water purification project of its kind in the world (www.gwrsystem.com).
The new facility replaces a 32-year-old building and several add-on portable trailers that OCWD had outgrown. Expanding and rehabilitating the old laboratory to meet seismic and other safety requirements would have been more costly than building a new facility that is needed to meet current and future water quality testing requirements. The new laboratory incorporated green building practices like use of locally manufactured materials with recycled components and low emissions of volatile organic compounds, and recycled water for onsite landscape irrigation. Key design strategies from LABS 21 (a federal government program to promote better laboratory design) have been incorporated into the design.
Groundwater provides up to 75 percent of the water needed for more than 2.4 million water users in north and central Orange County. Benefits of OCWD’s water quality testing for its retail water agencies include quality control, consistency of testing and ease of reporting water quality data to state and other regulatory agencies.
The Advanced Water Quality Assurance Laboratory was dedicated on Thursday, October 15, 2009. OCWD wishes to thank the following organizations for their support: