Ever wonder what is in the water coming out of your tap or out of that sprinkler at the golf course? The chemists at the Mulberry Treatment Plant Laboratory have those answers.

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Beakers, test tubes and microscopes are part of the tools three chemists use at the lab at 340 Mulberry Ave., every single day. The tests help ensure that the quality of water from the city’s water and wastewater treatment plants are meeting environmental and safety specifications. But what started as a side project to save a few dollars on testing has become a revenue generator for the city in the last several years as more than a dozen agencies across Arizona, including Kingman, Yucca, Havasu Heights and Parker, use the lab for testing. For the fiscal year 2009-2010, lab contracts generated $33,272 for the city, according to the city wastewater division.

“The work that the chemists at our laboratory do is really high quality and has become well respected throughout the state,” said Lake Havasu City Wastewater Manager Doug Thomas. “That quality is evidenced by the number of agencies that we provide services.”

Senior chemist Thilak Fernando and lab technicians George Waggoner and Sophia Quinones perform more than 18 certified tests on the city’s effluent (or treated wastewater) and drinking water. The tests, which are certified through the Arizona Department of Health Services, monitor nitrates, ammonia, coliform bacteria and other potentially dangerous substances on a daily basis.

“We have millions of dollars of equipment that’s treating water to a certain quality and we need to know if it’s working or not,” Thomas said. “So if it’s not working, we need to find out what’s wrong and fix it as fast as we possibly can. That’s where the lab comes in. Having an on-site lab gives us that opportunity to make changes faster.”

While the chemists work with the best available tools, certain tests still have minimum completion times of 24 hours.

“It’s definitely not ideal but that’s the fastest that technology will allow,” Thomas said. “The good news is, for Lake Havasu and some of these other places that give us samples, we can have the results to them as soon as they’re available, which is a lot quicker than they could get anywhere else.”

Senior Chemist Fernando agreed, adding that residents should rest easy as there hasn’t been a positive test for bacteria on a drinking water sample in more than five years.

“I cannot remember the last time we had a positive test in Havasu. And when it happened, the problem was corrected immediately,” Fernando, who holds a PhD in chemistry, said. “Because the lab is here, the results are faster. If we didn’t have it, we’d either have to ship the samples or drive them to other cities. But here, as soon as we find the results, the water division knows and can make adjustments.”

Activated sludge treatment processes have been around for decades, Thomas said, but the level of detail and sophistication at the Mulberry Treatment Lab is state-of-the-art.

“It’s too much like science fiction to even imagine a world where we didn’t have these tests in place because it’s been around for so long,” he said. “The plant is here to clean up sewage to make it into a usable end product and a good quality of water. But our process is much more sophisticated than that. Our water can either be injected into the ground or it can be discharged into a waterway. In the end, it looks pristine.”

The water coming out of the treatment plant has met all Arizona Department of Environmental Quality standards as well as Arizona Department of Health Services qualifications for the last several years, according to documents from the city’s wastewater division. But with about 3.3 million gallons of effluent water produced every day, according to Public Works Director Mark Clark, the water can occasionally sit in ponds if it is not used right away.

A few representatives of a few public golf courses, which use the city’s effluent water to irrigate the courses, told city officials of poor quality effluent coming out of the sprinkler systems. Clark said those issues were largely due to the water sitting in percolation ponds.

“It’s something like 0.3 million gallons a day in the summertime that we can’t use,” Clark said “In the wintertime, the golf courses cut back their use by about half so we’re giving only about 1.5 million gallons a day for watering. That means we have about 1.5 that has to be wasted.”

Thomas agreed.

“If you look at water quality coming out of the treatment process itself, like I said, it’s pristine,” he said. “But it feeds into a pond and then becomes subject to environmental conditions. So the quality of effluent water depends on how quickly the water is used.”