Purpose

The City of Lumberton Environmental Laboratory Department is committed to producing quality laboratory data. The results reported from this laboratory help ensure environmental protection for the City of Lumberton. The Laboratory maintains State of North Carolina laboratory certification through compliance with all certification requirements.

The laboratory performs various environmental analyses on water, wastewater and our Pretreatment Program. The analysts take pride in the quality of work and data they produce.

Testing

The Laboratory analyzes environmental parameters for the City's Wastewater Plant, Water Plant and Pretreatment Program. We test and monitor numerous samples daily such as:

• For wastewater we test for Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), fecal coliform, chlorine, total suspended solids, ammonia, and metals just to name a few.
• We also analyze for priority pollutant scans on an annual basis.
• For our Water Plant we run tests such as, total coliform, iron, chlorine, trihalomethanes, testing new water lines and we also test for Cryptosporidium which is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2 year study.
• Our pretreatment program monitors all of the industries within the City.

We require the industries to monitor certain parameters to ensure that they are not discharging anything harmful into the environment and to the city. The city Pretreatment Officers set up portable samplers at each industry so that we may verify they are being good stewards of the environment. The industries are inspected each year by our Pretreatment Officers.