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GC/MS IDENTIFICATION OF DRINKING WATER DISINFECTION BY-PRODUCTS FROM MILWAUKEE'S NEW OZONATION PLANTS
Citation:
Thruston Jr., A D., S D. Richardson, L. A. Couillard, C. Lewis, AND P. Klappa. GC/MS IDENTIFICATION OF DRINKING WATER DISINFECTION BY-PRODUCTS FROM MILWAUKEE'S NEW OZONATION PLANTS. Presented at 51st American Society for Mass Spectrometry Conference, Montreal, Canada, June 8-12, 2003.
Impact/Purpose:
(1) Use toxicity-based approach to identify DBPs that show the greatest toxic response. (2) Comprehensively identify DBPs formed by different disinfectant regimes for the 'Four Lab Study'. (3) Determine the mechanisms of formation for potentially hazardous bromonitromethane DBPs.
Description:
The Milwaukee Water Works recently added ozonation disinfection facilities to their municipal drinking water treatment. Coupling ozone treatment with biologically active filtration (BAF) was seen as a logical step to enhance multiple water quality objectives (an effective barrier to further Cryptosporidium contamination in light of the 1993 outbreak, in which 400,000 people became ill, and 100 people died), and fit current industry and regulatory trends toward organics removal. Because of concerns about potential increased levels of disinfection by-products (DBPs) in the finished water resulting from ozonation, special emphasis was placed on the use of biological filtration as a technique to potentially remove most of these DBPs from the finished water - which is of growing interest in the U.S. This led to a collaboration with EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) facility in Athens, GA to collect a series of samples from various stages of water treatment from the Milwaukee plant in August 2002. These samples were analyzed for a comprehensive list of DBPs (including many DBPs that are not regulated).