Water Resources Monitoring Program

The Cambridge Water Department (CWD) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have established a partnership to gather technical information on the health of the Source Drinking Water Area for the City of Cambridge. The goal of this partnership is to design and implement water resources monitoring programs and reports in order to optimize the management of the water supply both for water quality and water quantity purposes. Several reports and fact sheets have been developed as a result of the joint work efforts that describe methodology and results of the research conducted thus far.  These reports can be accessed through the links on the right side of this page.

Cambridge Drinking Water Source-Area Monitoring Program

The primary goal of the Cambridge drinking water source-area monitoring program is to ensure that water withdrawn from Fresh Pond Reservoir for treatment is as free as possible from contaminants, thereby minimizing the costs of treatment and protecting overall water quality. Specific objectives of the program are to:

• Monitor the condition of source waters in the Cambridge drinking water supply system;
• Determine where, when, and how water-quality conditions are changing over time;
• Identify actual and potential problems related to source-water quality;
• Evaluate effectiveness of programs to prevent or remediate problems;
• Ensure that all applicable water-quality goals, standards, and guidelines are being met; and
• Provide for rapid response to emerging problems.