Riverside County streamlines stormwater compliance inspections & reporting and monitors fire impacts

The district wanted to improve the tracking of water chemistry parameters and automate the data processing required by the state.

The District protects residents from damaging flood and storm waters as the operator of drainage services in California's third fastest-growing area.

It performs NPDES compliance as the principal permittee on three MS4 permits issued by three regional water quality boards which oversee pollution control.

Strict adherence to Quality Assurance (QA) requirements and compliance reporting is the most time-consuming and most critical aspect of the District's stormwater management program.

Complexities include the following challenges:

• An excessive collection and storage of metadata from discrete grab sampling events at specific locations and times to thorough review of lab analyses for particular constituents

• A mixture of frequency of monitoring and approach to each monitoring event at each site, from 1 to 6 times per year, to address prescribed components of each MS4 permit

• During each field visit, staff may collect information for up to 80 different data fields

• Collecting, managing, and analyzing thousands of water quality data points during wet and dry weather monitoring seasons in one year

• Maintaining an auditable chain of custody (COC) documents and lab results

Strict compliance to state QA and formatting requirements placed significant time constraints on district staff, who wanted to automate some of the data processing in order to recover and reallocate crucial labor hours.

Maintaining clean water compliance, especially after a number of historic wildfires in recent years, is the most critical aspect of the District’s stormwater management program. A solution was needed to track a wide array of water chemistry parameters.

The district adopted a water monitoring system that enabled tracking of water parameters and automation within the MS4 data workflow.  

Before implementing KISTERS software, the District wanted to improve its own data collection process.

To lessen the wide variety of requirements for each sampling site and ensure the collection of all mandatory and relevant data during each field visit, District staff were equipped with mobile devices and a data collection mobile app. Logic and standardized responses in the app successfully navigate staff through the nuances of each monitoring location. In addition to options to attach images and videos, the app confirms sampling locations, reduces transcription errors, and readily imports data into the data management system. (Refer to the 'Additional Attributes' screen capture in the image gallery.)

After all field visit data are imported into KISTERS’ Water Quality platform, the District is enabled to track a wide array of parameters and automates a significant part of the MS4 data workflow:

• Download of lab EDD files from ftp, email, web, and other sources

• Verification of actual lab results and ordered lab analysis and usage of approved vocabulary (Refer to the 'Sample Results' screen capture in the image gallery; parameter value exceedances are noted in red font.)

• Analysis and verification of reporting limits, objectives, and NPDES permit requirements