NJDEP had considered alternatives
to meet the Safe Drinking Water program's particular
electronic data management, reporting, and compliance
decision support necessary to meet the Federal
and State rules and regulations. Accordingly,
the NJDEP implemented the USEPA Safe Drinking
Water Information System (SDWIS/State) version
8.0, via contractual arrangement with the USEPA
and its contractor, Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC). The NJDEP entered into an
agreement with the USEPA to utilize the services
of SAIC to electronically migrate and convert
New Jersey’s Safe Drinking Water data from
the existing data management systems to SDWIS/State.
The contract, initially executed July 1, 2003,
was completed with delivery of the final New
Jersey SDWIS/State schema on May 25, 2004. This
highly successful contractual arrangement with
the USEPA and SAIC provided the NJDEP the means
by which to accomplish the effective and efficient
mapping and migration of numerous and extensive
databases to the appropriate inventory, analytical
sampling results, monitoring schedule, violation
and enforcement action databases in SDWIS/State.
Previously,
the New Jersey Safe Drinking Water program utilized
a mainframe data management system to facilitate
the program's efforts to ensure that water systems
meet the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water
Act, and to meet its obligations to the USEPA.
The mainframe data management system maintained
drinking water system inventory data and monitoring
analytical data used to determine compliance
with both monitoring requirements and drinking
water standards. The old mainframe computer application,
New Jersey Public Water System (NJPWS), was more
than 10 years old, and no longer capable to meet
both the existing and the new requirements under
the Safe Drinking Water Act, nor capable to provide
adequate reporting and compliance determination
capabilities. NJPWS was retired effective June
30, 2004. The available data contained in the
existing system was migrated to SDWIS/State,
to the greatest extent practicable. However,
additional work is required to migrate remaining
data to a legacy application. NJDEP proposes
to evaluate and determine the need to develop
any legacy computer application to provide a
user-friendly format for accessing any drinking
water data not migrated from NJPWS to SDWIS/State.
The
New Jersey Safe Drinking Water program placed
SDWIS/State version 8.0 into live production
on June 21, 2004, for subsequent use in compliance
decision support and federal reporting to the
USEPA. Immediately following the initiation of
production, the Safe Drinking Water program began
the task of manual data entry of all backlog
updates for inventory, analytical sampling results,
monitoring schedule, violation and enforcement
actions for calendar year 2004.
During 2005,
NJDEP developed and utilized MS-Access modules
in SDWIS/State to satisfy NJDEP data requests
to retrieve data from SDWIS/State, including
requests to assist with compliance determinations,
data quality evaluations, performance evaluations,
and general user reports to assist in the continued
implementation of SDWIS/State, as well as reports
for public data requests.
NJDEP has not yet achieved
full implementation of SDWIS/State 8.0, due to
the substantial complexity of SDWIS/State 8.0,
with its considerable functionality and built-in
modules. Accordingly, NJDEP continued its ongoing
efforts during 2005 to attain greater knowledge
and use of SDWIS/State 8.0, in order to further
its desire to fully implement SDWIS/State at
some time in the future. Such efforts to more
fully utilize SDWIS/State 8.0 will continue through
2006 and beyond.
In addition, there is a substantial
wealth of modules created by, and available through,
other SDWIS/State users, that need to be sought,
evaluated, and applied, as appropriate to the
New Jersey Safe Drinking Water program.
During
2005, NJDEP utilized the Data Transfer File (DTF)
reporting capabilities of SDWIS/State to report
inventory, actions, and samples to SDWIS/FED
for the period of 1993 through 2003, to replace
and update the federal SDWA database.
During
2005, NJDEP installed, tested, and implemented
the Safe Drinking Water Information System Federal
Reporting System (SDWIS/FedRep) version 1.2 in
compliance with the USEPA deadline of September
30, 2005 to upgrade to the new reporting tool.
SDWIS/FedRep has replaced the DTF Writer system
for reporting inventory, action, and sample data
to the USEPA. SDWIS/FedRep, is an integrated
set of tools that assist Drinking Water Public
Water System Supervision Primacy Agencies, USEPA
regions and USEPA Headquarters with the extraction
(SDWIS/State only), formatting (SDWIS/State only),
validation, and certification of federally reportable
drinking water data. FedRep also provides a message
notification tool that delivers status messages
to the user based on the processing stage of
the submitted data. SDWIS/FedRep improves the
accuracy of reporting to the federal data system.
SDWIS/FedRep uploads SDWA information to the
USEPA Central Data Exchange (CDX), then transferring
that data to the SDWIS/Operational Data System
(SDWIS/ODS) for additional validation before
moving it to the USEPA's data warehouse.
As of
December 2005, NJDEP used SDWIS/FedRep to report
to the USEPA for review, Inventory for the 1
year period of January 1, 2004 through December
31, 2004, Actions for the 3 year period of January
1, 2002 through December 31, 2004, and Samples
for the 1 year period January 1, 2004 through
December 31, 2004. NJDEP is developing a process
to correct errors when they are reported from
SDWIS/FedRep to the USEPA. NJDEP continues to
use SDWIS/FedRep to perform the required reporting
to the USEPA.
In May 2005, New Jersey implemented
the USEPA Drinking Water Watch application to
provide and support reporting and information
exchange. Drinking Water Watch provides the NJDEP
users (NJDEP Safe Drinking Water Program, and
NJDEP Compliance & Enforcement Program) and
the County Environmental Health Authority (CEHA)
regulatory agencies real time access to the inventory,
action, and sample data available in SDWIS/State
in a user-friendly format to facilitate the activities
to ensure compliance with the Safe Drinking Water
program.
In addition, New Jersey anticipates
implementing future updates and upgrades to SDWIS/State,
including selected modules developed by other
States using SDWIS/State, SDWIS/State web release
1 (SSwr1), and subsequent release versions of
SDWIS/State.
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