EPA Lab Testing

***ALL CERTIFICATIONS ARE REQUIRED FOR INTERESTED VENDORS***

The US Army Corps of Engineers plans to award a contract to provide laboratory testing services to the Washington Aqueduct according to federal and regional EPA and the Commonwealth of Virginia requirements for various chemical, biological, radiological, and other parameters for the purposes of complying with all Federal drinking water regulations and as required for special water and wastewater projects.

The WA Laboratory is certified by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region III to perform drinking water testing for regulatory compliance under the EPA Safe Drinking Water Act. EPA Region III considers the WA Laboratory to be a Principal State Laboratory (PSL) within Region III. As a PSL, the WA Laboratory is required by EPA to ensure all primacy critical analyses contracted to commercial laboratories are either certified under the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (NELAP) or be State Laboratories which are either NELAP certified or certified directly by EPA Region III. In addition, the commercial laboratory shall have federal EPA-approval for performing compliance testing under the EPA Unregulated Monitoring Rule (UCMR) and Long Term 2 (LT2) Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule. Because the WA Laboratory performs drinking water testing for Virginia customers, the commercial laboratory shall also maintain certification by the Commonwealth of Virginia drinking water program or Virginia Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (VELAP).

The commercial laboratory shall have a primary focus on supporting the drinking water community in the area of compliance testing using certified methods, as well as, the areas of pilot-project and research testing of both common and emerging contaminants using both established methods with appropriate modifications and recently-developed methods. The commercial laboratory shall have the capacity and capabilities to meet the needs for quick turnaround reporting of quality testing performed on high volumes of samples. It is also imperative that the laboratory not perform analyses on soil and waste matrices which are incompatible with the potable water matrix. The laboratory is required to maintain state-of-science current technology on all analytical equipment, sample collection, sample preparation, information management, and communications necessary to perform the services under this contract and should be able to adapt to all future analytical needs and requirements of the water supply industry.

The commercial laboratory shall meet all of the requirements described in the Performance Work Statement (PWS) and shall be certified (where applicable) and capable of testing for all of the parameters at or near the Minimum Reporting Limits (MRLs) using the prescribed methods (or equivalent).