Testing

I contaminated a coliform sample last June. My own well, my own kitchen tap, a bottle from the county lab I have filled a hundred times for other people. I ran the tap, wiped it with an alcohol pad from the truck, unscrewed the cap, set the cap threads-down on the counter while I reached…

The ice had started to thaw on the back steps that February morning when I filled the sample bottle from the hose bib by the utility room. The water came out cold and clear, the way it always does after a hard freeze, and I held the bottle under the stream while keeping my hand…

Most people figure arsenic in well water is a problem for somewhere else. The Ganges Delta, maybe, where deep tube wells went in decades ago and large numbers of people got poisoned by their own supply. That story is real. But the same element sits in the rock under plenty of American counties, and a…

I put chlorine down a customer’s well one October and told him I’d be back in a week to pull a sample. That was the mistake. I came back on day five, drew from the laundry tap the way I always do, and the sheet came back absent, total coliform, clean bill. I told him…

Most bad water samples are ruined before they ever leave the house. Kitchen Tap with the Aerator On The standard advice says to take the water from the kitchen tap. That works only if you understand what you are sampling. The kitchen tap often sits behind a filtration device, a softener, or what seems like…

That second sixty is the number that annoys me. Not because the lab overcharged. Because the paper sat in a drawer. A test you do nothing with is not protection. It is a receipt. I worked for a county water utility for 31 years reading other people’s results, and spent the last ten years drilling…