Lauren Baader, a hydrologist with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s water division, fills up bottle after bottle of groundwater, occasionally taking droppers to apply solution. She fills multiple bottles, a process that takes her about an hour.
“The reason we use these is because they have a rubber gasket that allows us to purge air from the sample,” she explains.
The ADEQ said some of the most common contaminants in groundwater are arsenic and uranium.
Trevor Baggiore, the ADEQ’s director of the water quality division said contaminants like those are naturally occurring because we live in a state with a lot of minerals. He said there are other contaminants like nitrates that humans add.
You can’t see the contaminants, so that’s why the ADEQ tests the groundwater.
“The deeper you go, the less likely you’re going to find changes because that water is more consistent. Upper aquifers closer to the surface can have a more rapid change in them,” Baggiore said.
He said the level of change depends on which part of the state they’re in, but he said some groundwater hasn’t changed for decades.
“Every time you pump an aquifer, that groundwater is going to change and that can affect the quality of the water as it’s getting pulled from different parts of the aquifer,” he said.
The ADEQ said over 40 percent of Arizona’s population gets drinking water from groundwater. Their ambient groundwater monitoring program tests 51 groundwater basins throughout Arizona for contaminants.
It costs at least $4,000 at each testing site, but it’s all to make sure Arizona’s groundwater is clean and healthy.
Baggiore said after collecting samples, they are analyzed in a lab.
They’ll take that information, put it into a database and then share the information with private well owners and sister agencies that focus on water.
The ADEQ said their sampling helps more than 330 thousand Arizonans who rely on private wells for drinking water.
Since they want to grow their database, Baggiore said it’s important that more people give them access to their wells.
“The more we know about the thousands of constituents that are out there, the more we are going to expand our monitoring the portfolio of pollutants that we monitor for,” he said.
——-
Andrew Christiansen is a reporter for KGUN 9. Before joining the team, Andrew reported in Corpus Christi, Texas for KRIS6 News, Action 10 News and guest reported in Spanish for Telemundo Corpus Christi. Share your story ideas with Andrew by emailing andrew.christiansen@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook, or Twitter.
