The City of Vancouver owns and operates the Vancouver Landfill located in Delta, British Columbia, which is a municipal solid waste landfill receiving approximately 400,000 tonnes per year of municipal solid waste. The total area of the landfill is 635 hectares of which approximately 225 hectares has been filled since landfill operations commenced in 1966.

George Twarog, environmental technician with the City of Vancouver, sampling water quality monitoring wells.

As part of its environmental protection program, Vancouver has beencollecting and analyzing water quality data for more than 20 years. In January 1997, the City converted from a mainframe based in-house computer database to a personal computer based database. Vancouver selected Gemcom Software International Inc.'s EQWin, as an environmental monitoring database.

The landfill's water quality monitoring program consists of sampling 36 surface and groundwater locations from three to twelve times per year. Each sample is analyzed for up to 30 analytical parameters. Sample data are compared to several standards as well as to background values. Sampling alone takes up to 30 person days per year, and analytical costs exceed $50,000 per year. To allow convenient interpretation of water quality data it is important to have a user friendly, reliable and flexible environmental database program.

Prior to 1995, the City of Vancouver stored water quality monitoring data on a mainframe based computer system. Data was manually entered into a data file and then uploaded into the computer system. Reporting programs for the system were written in Fortran. Therefore, any analysis other than standard tri-annual reports required assistance from computer services staff. Data entry and checking took up to two days per reporting session. In 1996, the system was improved to allow electronic downloading of the analytical data from the laboratory, eliminating manual data entry. Nonetheless, a better system was required to allow easier data analysis.

In 1996, the City issued a request for proposals to develop a personal computer based database for storing water quality and other environmental monitoring data. The information that the City required included:

• water quality parameters from groundwater wells, surface water sampling locations and leachate sampling locations;
• flow and water level data from leachate ditches and clean surface water locations;
• all sample location coordinates;
• monitoring well construction information (date, geological characteristics, and hydrogeological characteristics);
• landfill gas quality & quantity data; and
• composting facility operating data.

The data included new, as well as historical data from the City's mainframe system. Vancouver required that the system be flexible enough to allow the addition of new parameters and monitoring locations.

To allow reporting and analysis of the data, Vancouver required that the system provide convenient output of:

• Raw data.
• Specific reports including comparison to various standards.
• Basic graphs and statistics.
• Export data for spreadsheet programs such as Lotus or Excel.

Two proposals were received to design an environmental monitoring database. Both proposals exceeded $30,000 and included development of a custom database for Vancouver. After review, it was determined that further analysis was required. The primary drawbacks of a custom database would be:

• Vancouver would need to fund the full development cost of the database;
• the City would need to fund any future upgrades of the system to meet technological or site changes; and
• supporting the database would be expensive.

An internet search as well as phone calls with potential suppliers yielded only one suitable off the shelf product, EQWin, developed by GemTeck Environmental Software Ltd. to store and analyze environmental monitoring data for Teck's mining operations. Environmental monitoring requirements for landfills are very similar to those of mines.

EQWin met Vancouver's requirements without any modifications to the program. Historical data could be easily converted to EQWin's data storage format. New data are uploaded into the database in a manner similar to that used for the mainframe. Data is downloaded from the analytical laboratory into a data file. The data file is imported into EQWin's worksheet and then configured for uploading into its database. A set-up and checking system validates the data prior to uploading to the database. The system is fully Y2K compliant in that all date information is stored in a yyyy/mm/dd format.

Output from EQWin also meets Vancouver's requirements and generates user configurable reports with comparisons to user specified standards, which may be calculated standards, dependant of hardness or pH, etc. If individual sample data exceed a standard, a flag is displayed adjacent to the value. EQWin alsohas extensive graphing and statistical functions as well as dealing with "less-than" values, non-numeric values and parameter filtering when querying. Data can be exported for use in other spreadsheet or GIS application software. The initial cost was less than one-third of the price of a custom designed system. Ongoing development of EQWin ensures that the program will continue to meet Vancouver's needs into the future.