Links to water data for New Jersey including streamflow, sampling stations, and water-quality data with links to reports on stream gages, hydrology, networks, and floods.
The area contributing recharge to this aquifer is undergoing rapid growth, generating more wastewater. We found that nitrate, a major component of wastewater and a nutrient that can degrade water quality, has increased in the creeks in this area.
Despite public sector efforts to reduce nonpoint-source nutrients in streams and rivers, concentrations have remained the same or increased, continuing to pose risks to aquatic life and human health.
Water monitoring results, focused on wastewater compounds, human-health pharmaceutical compounds, hormones, and antibiotics in water, and waste indicators, hormones, and antibiotics in solids.
In all, 56 compounds were detected in samples collected approximately monthly during 2003-05 at the intake for the Clackamas River Water plant. On the basis of this screening-level assessment, adverse effects to human health are assumed to be negligible.
Reports concentration of organic compounds here, to serve as a baseline against which future measurements can be compared and to provide a general assessment of the quality of local water treatment efforts.
We identified six compounds at concentrations less than human-health benchmarks, but within a factor of 10 of those limits. Those compounds might warrant further study to understand their transport and fate within the watershed.
The 258 organic compounds in this assessment are man-made: pesticides, solvents, gasoline hydrocarbons, personal-care and domestic-use products, pavement and combustion-derived compounds. None were found in concentrations deemed dangerous at this time.
Measured concentrations of many compounds in water people use. Some compounds are regulated as health hazards; a few of these were over the benchmark limits. Others may become issues of concern, so studies such as this give us helpful background levels.