SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Environmental Scientist Kayli Paterson from the San Francisco Estuary Institute is hitting the road with colleague David Peterson and a trunk full of water sampling robots.
“Yeah, I think the max we’ve ever done was five. But the sites are very close together. Oh, there it is. Hopefully it samples well,” says Paterson as she turns the mobile sampling lab onto a private oak-lined road.
They’re closing in on a watershed creek flowing through the hillsides near the San Andreas Lake reservoir, west of Highway 280 in Millbrae, part of the larger watershed that eventually drains into San Francisco Bay.
“So, we’ve got our sampler. Look at the battery. Hook that up, red and black. This is a 12-volt lithium battery, and it powers our sampler for probably about six to seven days,” she explains, showing off a self-contained unit miniaturized into a portable case.
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The black cases are their latest innovation in stormwater science. Robotic samplers anchor in key sections of the watershed to monitor not only flow, but also the chemicals and pollutants washing downstream toward the Bay.
“And this is a front-line pollution sampler. It’s getting the stormwater before it enters the Bay. And so, we want to know what’s coming into the Bay and getting these samplers out there in more locations will give us a better idea of where we might have issues, where a hotspot is, or maybe a previously unknown contaminant,” says Paterson.
“It’s important to get out that fast,” her colleague David Peterson adds. “You know, in these storms as they’re happening, because the water is picking up pollutants in real time, and we need to be there to capture them.”
When we first met Peterson several years ago, he and another Estuary Institute team were sampling water along the Bay shoreline by hand, a technique that’s still valuable. But to cover more ground, Kayli and a group of collaborators began developing the robotic samplers over recent storm seasons.
Kayli and David start by chaining the unit itself to a tree near the creek bank. The system employs remote-controlled pumps that draw samples from the creek and store them in onboard containers. The software controlling the volume and frequency can be operated from a phone app.
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One of the key targets in this study is a group of so-called “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, synthetic compounds that persist in the environment and have been detected in widespread areas of the Bay.
“And we capture samples and send them off to analytics labs across the country. Typically, universities or private labs will process these for us,” Peterson explains.
For these two stormwater detectives, it’s a mission that requires a combination of speed and patience**, chasing flowing water** through creeks and storm drains, sampling as they go.
“So, we’re looking for areas – the point of this is to do source control. Ultimately, we want to be able to trace this back to a possible source,” says Kayli Paterson.
And potentially prevent a source of toxic pollution from reaching San Francisco Bay and our Bay Area ecosystem.
More than a dozen of the robots were given names in a special contest, including the Big Sipper and the Tubeinator.
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