7.8

Field and Laboratory Quality Assurance/Quality Control

One of the fundamental responsibilities of the owner/operator is the establishment of

continuing programs to ensure the reliability and validity of field and analytical laboratory

data gathered as part of the overall ground water monitoring program. Chapter One of SW 

846 provides guidance on establishing and maintaining field and laboratory quality control

programs. Specifically, Chapter One of SW 846 provides guidance for the following areas:

Control samples;

Acceptance criteria;

Deviations;

Corrective action for sampling and analysis procedures;

Data handling;

Laboratory control samples;

Method blanks; and

Matrix specific effects.

The owner/operator's QAPjP should explicitly describe the QA/QC program that will

be used in the field and laboratory. The Data Quality Objectives (DQOs) of the project

should be described in terms of precision, accuracy, completeness, representativeness and

comparability for field activities (sampling, measurements, and screening) and laboratory

analyses, including the project required acceptance limits and means to achieve these QA

objectives. Chapter One of SW 846 provides a discussion of DQOs. The QAPjP should

specify the preventative maintenance procedures that will be used for field and laboratory

instruments and ground water monitoring wells. A table showing the type of maintenance to

be performed and the frequency is appropriate. Many owner/operators use commercial

laboratories to conduct analyses of ground water samples. When commercial laboratories are

contracted by the owner/operator to analyze ground water samples, the owner/operator's

QAPjP should be used by the laboratory analyzing the samples for the owner/operator.

As described in Section 3.4.1 of Chapter One of SW 846, both field and laboratory

QC samples should be prepared during the sampling event. Chapter One of SW 846

recommends that the following samples be analyzed with each batch of samples (a batch may

not exceed 20 samples):

November 1992

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