Sacramento — State Water Board quality staff presented a draft quality‑assurance framework for post‑fire water monitoring and urged advance planning so agencies can collect comparable, publishable data after future fires.

Renita Prasad, the State Water Board’s quality assurance officer, described a three‑phase approach that treats each post‑fire monitoring effort as a rapid‑response QA project plan with clearly defined objectives and data‑quality objectives (DQOs). She asked councils and partners to prepare before fires by agreeing to minimum analyte lists, data templates, communications pathways and public data repositories so that the data collected after an event are fit for both immediate management decisions and longer‑term assessment.

Why it matters: monitoring data serve different decisions — whether a beach should be closed today, whether a drinking‑water intake is at risk, or how to assess ecosystem impacts over years. Prasad said a standardized QA approach would reduce ambiguity during an urgent response and help agencies compare results across fires.

Framework summary: Prasad laid out three phases:
- Pre‑monitoring (planning): clarify decision questions, set DQOs, pick minimum analytes and identify labs and data platforms. Prasad called this the “biggest lift” because decisions made now determine the quality and usefulness of data later.
- Active monitoring (implementation): coordinate sampling and lab analysis against the pre‑defined plan and use established communication channels for rapid reporting.
- Post‑monitoring (assessment): use comparable, documented data to evaluate acute impacts and longer‑term trends.

She recommended integrating QA practices throughout: define data comparability, standardize sampling and analytical methods, document chain‑of‑custody and QA/QC, and define the public data‑management strategy.

Council response and next steps: Several council members urged the Monitoring Council to turn the existing ad‑hoc subcommittee on post‑fire monitoring into a formal working group and to develop an engagement plan for local, state and federal partners. Greg Gearhart, the council’s State Water Board co‑chair, proposed forming a working group and said the council should “start with an email list” and an engagement plan that maps existing regional networks so resources are not duplicated.

Participants suggested specific near‑term deliverables the working group could tackle:
- A short “default analyte” list for rapid first‑flush sampling (metals, turbidity, nutrients and a shortlist of organics) and recommended lab detection limits to ensure comparability.
- Simple, public data‑submission templates and a lightweight dashboard that multiple agencies can use to upload and visualize results.
- An engagement plan identifying county health departments, RCDs, Cal OES, federal partners (USGS, NOAA) and local stormwater programs as potential collaborators.

Implementation challenges and considerations: Prasad and attendees noted practical obstacles: limited staff time during emergencies, variation in lab detection limits and methods among different agencies, and the need to balance a short, deployable analyte list with the desire to do broad non‑targeted screening when resources allow. They emphasized the value of existing regional groups — for example, the Feather River working group led by Central Valley staff — as templates for scalable coordination.

Closing: The council agreed to follow up: staff will convene the interested presenters and members who already participate in ad‑hoc discussions, assemble an initial contact list and draft an engagement plan and list of near‑term deliverables for the council’s next meeting.

Ending note: Council members said the combination of pre‑defined QA practices and a working group that taps regional expertise is the most practical next step to produce useful, comparable post‑fire data that serve both urgent management needs and longer‑term environmental assessment.