“However, there has been a big emphasis shift to chemical analysis,” he adds. We still do a lot of that work,” Nanney says: in fact, on a lab counter sits a tray full of plastic vessels the size of newborn baby bottles, holding treated water that just tested negative for those bacteria. “Forty years ago, the primary function of a water quality lab was to do microbiology, to look at samples for total coliform and E. “Our lab probably does 2,000 to 2,500 analytical tests per month,” says chemist Chris Nanney. They’re ready to take action if anything alarming pops up in the samples continually taken from the reservoirs, water treatment plants, and sampling stations throughout Marin and from customers’ kitchen sinks Inside MMWD’s Water Quality Lab, three chemists work daily to measure just what is in your water, and how much. I, for instance, grew up drinking from Lake Michigan, near Milwaukee, where in 1993 a protozoan called cryptosporidium sickened 400,000 people.īut just because the liquid in your tap flows from mountain lakes and from far below ground doesn’t mean there’s nothing but H2O in there. Not everyone is lucky enough to drink from such pristine sources. Three-quarters of our drinking water starts out as raindrops on Mount Tam, with the remaining quarter drawn from deep below the Russian River, where it is naturally filtered by 60 feet of sand beds. On the day I visited, the peak was wrapped in a fluffy cloud muffler the autumn’s first storm had just deposited a much-needed contribution to the seven reservoirs up there. LOOK UP AS you enter Marin Municipal Water District’s Water Quality Laboratory and you’ll see where most of Marin County’s water comes from: Mount Tamalpais.
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