At the River Mountains Water Treatment Facility in Henderson, a team of scientists works to track emerging contaminants - like PFAS and norovirus - in different water sources of Southern Nevada.
It's called R&D, or Research and Development, and it's a program out of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
“We like to think of ourselves as 'Water Doctors," Eric Wert, R&D Manager, told Channel 13.
"We have a lot of experience, a lot of folks here have PhDs in engineering, chemistry, or microbiology, and we're here to take care of the water."
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Drinking water is regulated by the EPA, and utilities are required to make sure 91 contaminants - like lead and arsenic - stay below legal limits.
According to Wert, this team takes that work a step further.
“Our team, over the last 25 years has published almost 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals," he said. "So we have a whole team here that focuses on regulatory compliance as well as looking beyond the regulations to make sure that our customers are protected from chemical exposure as well as emerging contaminants."
It’s not required for utilities to conduct this kind of research, and according to Principle Research Scientist Daniel Gerrity it’s pretty rare.
“I love working here because it is very unique in the water industry. So there's just a handful of utilities around the country that can look for PFAS, even, or evaluate treatment technologies for PFAs or emerging microbes," Gerrity said.
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This year, the EPA announced the first ever rule for PFAS . These ‘Forever Chemicals’ now need to be maintained below 4 parts per trillion in drinking water - that’s only 4 drops in an olympic-sized swimming pool.
Fortunately, SNWA reports, it's not very common in our primary water source - Lake Mead.
“We already have 15 years of data to go back and say or to the public and say, ‘Hey, we know that we don't have a concern here related to PFAs, because we've been looking at it for so long.’ And so that's the type of work that R&D can do, is make sure that we're ahead of the game. We know what’s coming down the pipeline," Gerrity said.
Beyond emerging chemical concerns, the team started looking into disease prevalence in 2019.
“Being able to understand pathogen dynamics in the population and also in wastewater, helps us predict concentrations of those pathogens that might appear in Lake Mead, then we will be prepared to treat for those types of outbreak occurrences in our drinking water," Katherine Crank, SNWA Research Microbiologist, explained.
Crank said that this kind of work is becoming increasingly more important in the water world, as wastewater was previously untapped as a data source.
"Norovirus, enterovirus, adenovirus, cryptosporidium and giardia...these gastrointestinal pathogens are quite relevant to looking at the type of [water] reuse that we're engaged in here in Southern Nevada," Crank said.
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