On August 10th TRWA restarted it’s watershed monitoring program after a one year, four month pause due to the Covid 19 pandemic. We paused the program in 2020 to keep our sampling volunteers and our partners at the Taunton wastewater treatment plant safe. Now that our volunteers have had the opportunity to get fully vaccinated we restarted the program. Our volunteers wear masks when dropping off samples at the WWTP lab.
We held our annual training event outside at our Sweets Knoll State Park River Center on the last Saturday morning the month before our sampling program resumed. We have 22 volunteer samplers working on 9 teams sampling 20 locations in the watershed the second Tuesday morning of each month this year.
We had a great day for the training and for our first day sampling. We will be posting the results of the August 2021 samples in the next couple of weeks once we receive them from our contract laboratory.
TRWA’s MassDEP Quality Assurance Project Plan approved monitoring is important because it is the only monitoring in the upper watershed tracking the effects of development, climate change and wastewater treatment plant upgrades on water quality. This information is important for tracking trends, identifying problems and suggesting measures to promote the health of the Taunton River and the people and wildlife this ecosystem sustains.
A big thank you to our returning and new sampling volunteers as well as our partners at Veolia – Taunton WWTP!