Mason County Public Health’s Water Quality Program is concerned with both ground and surface waters in order to protect public health, environmental health and water as a resource. The purpose of the Water Quality Program is to prevent pollutants from entering ground or surface waters, to monitor for evidence of pollution, and to correct sources of pollution. A successful water quality program will ensure that the long term quality of waters in Mason County are maintained so that the public is protected from waterborne illnesses, environmental degradation is minimized or avoided, and economic well-being is preserved (including recreation and shellfishing).

Criteria set by the Washington State Departments of Ecology and Health for water quality parameters provide standards that all ground and surface waters must meet in Washington State. The Mason County Water Quality Program conducts monitoring, lab analysis, long-term trend analysis, investigations, and emergency/complaint response in order to ensure that waters of Mason County meet the criteria. Additionally, the Water Quality Program seeks out and receives grants for projects intended to prevent waters from failing or restore waters to those standards. Criteria are set for biological, chemical and physical parameters. Although other measurements are routinely collected, the Water Quality Program is primarily concerned with biological contaminants due to the correlation with human illnesses. Note that the Drinking Water Program is its own program with similar goals, but different methods.

The criteria are based on levels of bacteria that can indicate the presence of pathogens (harmful bacteria, viruses or protozoa) that can cause human illness. Many such pathogens exist and monitoring for all of them would be impractical. Therefore, “indicator” bacteria have been selected that exhibit, in a given environment, a similar ability to survive as the pathogens of concern. Currently, three bacterial indicators are used to detect the presence of pathogens: E. coli, Enterococci, and Fecal Coliform.

Currently, the analysis for Fecal Coliform (FC) bacteria is the primary indicator of non-point pollution when evaluating ground and surface water quality. FC bacteria exist in the intestines of warm-blooded animals including humans, pets, livestock, birds, wildlife, etc. FC found in water samples can indicate the presence of human sewage and animal waste and their associated pathogens. Assessing contamination associated with this pollution source is the primary focus of the program. FC is the parameter selected to be monitored by the State Department of Ecology in freshwater streams, storm water runoff, seeps, etc.

Chemical and physical parameters that are monitored on a regular basis are Dissolved Oxygen (DO), nutrients (primarily Nitrogen), pH, turbidity, conductivity, and temperature, and are routinely recorded during Ambient Monitoring sampling.

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