16 Water/Wastewater
Integrated Sampling is the Answer to Protecting the World's Most Precious Resource
Drinking water suppliers around the world face unique challenges: They must deliver the most essential ingredient for life on a grand scale, whilst also navigating complex issues surrounding public safety, regulations and infrastructure. In the U.S., for instance, 240 million people rely on more than one million miles of pipes for clean drinking water, but water infrastructure is aging fast. In the U.S. alone, large sections of it are 50, even 100, years old, and estimates to replace the system range from $335 million by 2027 (the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)) to $1 trillion by 2035 (the American Water Works Association). In light of these challenges, how do water suppliers ensure that the millions of people around the globe who use public water receive a safe, reliable product?
LIMS are the key to addressing growing challenges with monitoring and compliance, and they have become more necessary and more prevalent in today’s labs.
One common answer is comprehensive sampling and analysis of the water supply. To comply with strict new standards, follow business best practices and, of course, keep customers safe and happy, water suppliers manage enormous testing programs, collecting and testing millions of water samples from myriad sources. Conducting and analysing these tests is an immense undertaking, but laboratory information management systems (LIMS), which automate sample planning and laboratory processes and integrate analytical data from across the lab and outside – even in the most remote locations – help modern labs keep pace.
This article will illustrate how the world’s leading water suppliers integrate the sample collection and analysis process, and use LIMS to maximise the efficiency of these programs. As a best practice example, we’ll highlight Northern Ireland Water, a government- owned company that supplies water to 800,000 properties in Northern Ireland.
The Challenges of Water Sampling Today
Author Details: Colin Thurston,
Director of Product Strategy, Process Industries, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Gayle Gleichauf, Applications Lab Manager
for Water Analysis Instruments, Thermo Fisher Scientific Thermo Fisher Scientific, LIMS & Laboratory Software Philadelphia, PA 19102, USA Tel: +44 1619 42 30 00 Email:
marketing.informatics@
thermofisher.com Web:
www.thermoscientific.com/informatics
Over the last decade, the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (NELAP) and the EPA in the U.S., along with other regulatory bodies around the world, such as the European Commission and the Drinking Water Inspectorate in the UK, have instituted rigorous new standards for water testing. The EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act, for example, empowers the agency to specify the legal limits for levels of contaminants in drinking water, and the EPA also determines the water testing methods and sampling schedules that water providers must follow. These regulations provide a set of protocols outlining what is acceptable within a multi-disciplinary water laboratory in accordance with internationally-accepted standards.
Stringent requirements dictate new labour-intensive procedures to ensure compliance, such as sample tracking, chain of custody (COC), record keeping, demonstration of capability (DOC), document control, reagent and standard traceability, proof of training and reporting. And since water testing labs must work closely with municipalities, municipal utility districts, water control and improvement districts and federal and state regulatory authorities, the number of tests and the data they generate create a massive amount of information.
Water sampling includes tests for both process control and safety/regulatory compliance. Process control tests help streamline water treatment and increase throughput, whereas safety and regulatory compliance sampling ensures that the water supplier provides a consistently clean, appealing product that complies with
AET August / September 2013
www.envirotech-online.com
government mandates. Many samples – collected by either field technicians at reservoirs or online instruments within processing plants – help proactively address process, safety and quality concerns early enough to adjust treatment processes if necessary. An example familiar to all water suppliers is the requirement to continuously measure turbidity (cloudiness) with online monitors and in the lab with optical turbidimeters. Turbidity may seem like a strictly aesthetic quality, but it is a safety concern as well. Higher turbidity levels are often associated with higher levels of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria. While the human eye can’t detect turbidity below 10 NTU (nephelometric turbidity units), water systems in the U.S. that use conventional or direct filtration cannot allow turbidity to exceed 1 NTU at any time, and must maintain a level less than 0.3 NTU 95 percent of the time.
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