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A typical day

Load the truck before sunrise: coolers, bottles, meters, spare batteries. Drive to a site and set up. Pull groundwater from monitoring wells, read the meters, bag and label everything, and fill in the chain of custody form that tracks who touched each sample. Ship the cooler to the lab before its cutoff. Back at the office, log the readings, calibrate the instruments for tomorrow, and check that nothing came back out of range. On a spill day, all of that is replaced by a protective suit and a long shift.