These dedicated and trained individuals gather the environmental samples that are the building blocks of that national story of water quality. It is not a simple matter of scooping up water into a bottle. We follow a carefully orchestrated protocol that ensures that the data are accurate and timely. Samples must be collected under conditions that keep the sample intact, identified, and uncontaminated. Samples must be treated on site and then quickly packed, chilled and sent immediately to this Laboratory for analysis.
Many chemicals are extremely time sensitive.
They can change or disappear within hours. Thus, the efficient design of this Laboratory is critical to our ability to conduct the kind of rapid analyses that are needed to truly describe the water as it existed in the natural environment. The sheer volume of work done at the NWQL is astounding. More than 30,000 individual samples from all over the Nation are received here each year and logged into the Laboratory's data base. And from those 30,000 samples, more than 1.5 million analytical determinations are made.