Tour of the Water Testing Laboratory

Same work load this week. I finished another three of those drawers, and will be jumping into #10-12 next week, which I believe to be the final three. On another note, there are no hidden meanings in the title this time; this week I took a tour of the City of Olathe Water Testing Laboratory. This was about a week and a half in the works, and completely due to the benevolence of Dewayne, the laboratory manager.

This tour was very interesting. The building consisted of a series of labs, some stereotypical, some not, but each with the purpose for testing both drinking and sewage water for different amounts of different things. This could range from bacteria, to oxygen, to organics, to pesticides, to minerals, as well as many things that I have never learned about. They did some of the tests by hand, seemingly fairly similar to the labs that I do in science classes, but the macro testing was done by very fancy machinery definitely not seen in my science classrooms.

I must say, not only did the amount of tests for this water surprise me, but even more so was the quantity of water that they had to test each year. If I recall correctly, they had to do over 1,400 samples in a year, with a staffing of only about 7 people running multiple tests on each sample. A large amount of it has to be done by the machinery, but from what I saw everyone was still hard at work continuously, especially with all of the documentation and compliances that have to be met. I only scratched the surface, but the amount of paperwork and pencil pushing seems to be even more massive than the amount of testing.

Overall, it seemed like quite laborious work, but the kind of work that is scientifically interesting and significant to the continuation of society. In conclusion, I now know where my water comes from and how it got there.