About Our Labs

The City of Hagerstown Utilities Department operates two laboratories, a certified potable water testing lab and a wastewater testing lab. The certified water lab and sewer lab perform approximately 7,000 US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and Maryland State regulated tests annually.

 Types of Tests Performed

The largest portion are tests for ammonia, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chlorine, E coli and total coliform bacteria, fluoride, nitrate and nitrite, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, Ortho and total phosphorus, pH, and solids. These tests include testing done on samples collected for the city / county cooperative Industrial Pretreatment Program. In addition, the lab performs more than 13,000 process tests annually. These tests produce results necessary for the proper treatment of water and wastewater at the city’s three treatment plants and also provide a check on water quality as it is distributed throughout the city’s system.

Combined with all the above testing, lab personnel collect hundreds of other USEPA regulated samples, sending them to contracted labs for analysis and then processing the results in a timely manner as they are returned.

 Consumer Confidence Reports (CCRs)

Another side function of the lab is to generate the EPA required annual Consumer Confidence Reports (CCRs) and have them sent to the city’s water customers as a bill stuffer by the city’s Billing Department.