USPS changes slow water sample deliveries to KDHE

For Jackson County water customers, whether they get their water through a rural water district or a city water supplier, knowing that the water they get from their kitchen faucets is safe to drink is of high importance - and the people who provide that water to them feel the same way.

Just ask Dennis Ashcraft, who oversees water treatment and distribution for Public Wholesale Water Supply District 18 and the city of Holton, who collects several water samples every month and sends them to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment lab in Topeka.

“There’s a whole lot of different things our water is tested for on a lot of different schedules, because they don’t want to make our life easy,” Ashcraft says with a laugh, the “they” in question being KDHE and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Those water samples are generally tested for the presence of coliform and E.coli bacteria, as are the groundwater samples that KDHE receives from Jackson County Rural Water District 3, manager Brenda Adkins said. The same goes for Jackson County Rural Water District 1, according to manager Greg Drinovsky.

In most cases, the way those Jackson County water samples get to the KDHE lab involves someone from each individual water district taking those samples down there directly. In the past, water system operators could depend on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver their water samples to KDHE in time.

But with the “streamlining” of Postal Service operations that both Ashcraft and Adkins say has actually caused delays in those water samples getting to KDHE’s lab, in many cases the water systems have decided to deliver their own samples to the lab, or hire a courier service to deliver those samples.

“It’s a concern with a lot of postal customers,” Adkins said. “We’ve had problems with that, and we’ve just been taking them down there more often, because we got reports back occasionally that will say the sample exceeded the hold time.”

KDHE’s maximum allowable “hold time” for most water samples is 24 hours, Ashcraft said.

“If it’s not tested within that 24 hours, it’s invalid, and you have to re-collect and resubmit,” he said. “We’ve had some issues with the postal service on that, although most of the time they’re pretty good about getting them there on time.”

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