Heidi Yelin, the laboratory manager, said there are a lot of monitoring requirements .
“I need to have the proper people the proper equipment, and funding to be able to send tests off-island,” she said.
The laboratory is under the water and wastewater division.
Yelin said the stipulated orders also require certain levels of certification for different types of jobs.
Despite limited personnel, she said the laboratory was able to maximize its available manpower.
“We just do what we can,” she added.
But she said water and wastewater operations require a sufficient number of personnel to attend to specific tasks.
“All of that requires money, and we need qualified people,” she said.
The water and wastewater division reported last week that the Division of Environmental Quality certified George Blas as wastewater collection plant operator.
Blas met the education, experience and examination requirements cited in the commonwealth wastewater treatment and disposal regulations in March.
In Nov. 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed and lodged two stipulated orders to bring into compliance CUC’s wastewater plants and collection systems, public drinking water systems, five power plants and an oil transfer pipeline.
As of February, CUC had accumulated over $4 million in penalties for failure to comply with the stipulated orders.
