1. Scope and Purpose of Program

As part of the drinking water indicators that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) is developing with the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), NJDEP has committed to determining which water systems in the State are vulnerable to lead and copper contamination through leaching from plumbing materials in the distribution system. One factor in predicting the leaching of these metals is the corrosivity of the water. NJDEP is interested in determining which systems in the State have corrosive water as characterized by corrosion indices such as Langelier, Aggressive, Ryznar, Stability, etc. so that the agency can target its limited resources to helping these systems reduce or prevent lead and copper contamination.

The long term goal of the Department concerning lead and copper, is that the drinking water for all the people in the State have lead and copper content below the maximum allowable contaminant level. Toward that end, the Department is interested in learning more about the vulnerability of certain systems to contamination by these metals through plumbing materials of the distribution system. Using water "corrosivity" as a potential predictor of lead and copper leaching, is one step toward this goal.

2. Summary of Objectives

a. Conduct a literature search of water corrosivity indices and determining the most appropriate one for corrosivity on lead and copper.

 

b. Experimentally determine the correlation between calculated corrosion indices and actual corrosion of water on lead and copper

 

c. Provide NJDEP with the corrosivity value of NJ drinking water entering the public community water supplies by calculating an appropriate water corrosivity index from available Bureau of Safe Drinking Water (BSDW) data base of Alkalinity, Hardness, and pH data.

 

d. Tabulate the corrosivity of NJ drinking water with respect to location.