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.

OCWD is constructing the Advanced Water Quality Assurance Laboratory on its Fountain Valley campus. The two-story steel framed building will house approximately 30 chemists and lab technicians, 10 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 will support 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). Construction of the laboratory began in August 2008 with a completion date set for spring 2009.

The new facility replaces a 32-year-old building and several add-on portable trailers that OCWD has 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 will incorporate 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.