National Drinking Water Contaminant Occurrence Data Base To: "DC - All District Chiefs" from: "Janice R Ward, Acting Chief, OWQ, Reston, VA" cc: wqspecs@srv1rvares.er.usgs.gov, "A - Division Chief and Staff", "SA - All System Administrators", "John C Briggs, Supv. Hydrologist, Reston, VA" , "Kathleen K Fitzgerald, Hydrologist, Reston, VA" Subject: National Drinking Water Contaminant Occurrence Data Base Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 09:20:55 -0400 Sender: "Nana L Frye, Secretary (OA), Reston, VA" The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) Amendments of 1996 require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a National Drinking Water Contaminant Occurrence Data Base (NCOD) for both regulated and unregulated contaminants (SDWA Amendments, section 126). Among other things, the NCOD will provide the basis for identifying contaminants that may be placed on the Contaminant Candidate List (SDWA Amendments, section 102(b)) and to support the Administrator's determinations to regulate contaminants in the future. After reviewing many options with stakeholders, EPA has decided that existing data bases will be used to populate the first release of NCOD. The first version of NCOD will be a combination of unregulated contaminant data from EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS-Fed; a compliance data base consisting of regulated and unregulated contaminant data collected from public-water systems after the water has been treated) and USGS NWIS data. The EPA has requested NWIS data from USGS for this purpose. As you are probably aware, with the retirement of WATSTORE there is no simple centralized mechanism for a nation-wide NWIS retrieval that is capable of accessing data presently stored in the Districts. Therefore, we are asking that each District participate in this nation-wide data request. Timely fulfillment of this data request will not only foster interagency relations with EPA by helping them meet their short-term needs and deadlines for NCOD development, but it could lead to future program development opportunities for USGS as emerging contaminant issues are identified. To simplify the retrieval, a script has been prepared by the NWIS staff. It will retrieve all water-quality data marked as ready to transmit or transmitted for the 1993-97 water years. Water-quality data marked as local use only will not be retrieved. The script will package the data and move it to the local ftp area so that it can be retrieved by headquarters personnel via anonymous ftp. While this retrieval itself will take several hours of machine time, the actual time required by District personnel should be 5 minutes or less. Instructions for running the retrieval are available at: http://wwwnwis.er.usgs.gov/special/epa_retrieval.html If there are any questions about the procedures for making this retrieval, please contact John Briggs (jbriggs) or Kathy Fitzgerald (kkfitz). Questions regarding NCOD should be directed to Mike Focazio (mfocazio). We are requesting that this retrieval be completed by June 23rd. Thank you for your assistance in helping with this important effort.