What you keep.
What you send.

What you have to keep, and for how long

Three years, from the date of the sample, measurement, report or application. That is the whole rule, and it is shorter than most people assume. It sits in Monitoring Provisions 2(e), PDF p. 60 (printed 54).

What the three years covers, in the Order’s own list:

• Records of all monitoring data and information.
• Calibration and maintenance records.
• Original strip chart recordings from any continuous monitoring instrument.
• Copies of every report the Order required you to submit.
• Records of all data used to complete your application.

Two things extend it. The clock is paused by unresolved litigation about the discharge, and the regional board can simply ask you to keep records longer. Separately, you have to hand over copies on request, so “kept” means retrievable rather than merely undestroyed.

One record has its own rule: field calibration reports must be kept at least three years (G-2). That is the same period, stated separately, and it applies to the pH, conductivity and dissolved oxygen meters a lot of facilities treat as too routine to document.

And two documents that live at the facility, not in a drawer

A copy of the General Order and of your own Notice of Applicability, including your MRP, has to be kept at the facility for operating personnel, and key operating personnel must be familiar with the contents (PDF p. 63, printed 57). That second half is a requirement about people, not paper, and it is the one an inspector can test by asking somebody a question.

The reporting calendar

Three report types, and which apply to you depends on your tier. Compliance Letters and Annual Reports reach everybody; Semi-annual Reports are Tier 4 only.

The Compliance Letter does two jobs and most operators only know about one of them. It is a standalone filing in any month a violation or exceedance occurs. It is also the transmittal letter that accompanies every monitoring report you send, violation or not (G-18, and again in Table G-1 footnote 1). A winery with a clean year still writes Compliance Letters. They just ride on top of the reports instead of going out on their own.

Where reports go, and in what format

The State and regional boards have moved to a paperless system. Unless your NOA says otherwise: narrative reports as PDF, data as a spreadsheet (csv, txt, xls) or Word, sent by email to your regional board (G-19). Your NOA carries the instructions and tells you what has to be in the transmittal email, which is a detail worth reading rather than guessing.

Three requirements about the data itself, all on G-19 and all easy to miss because they are prose rather than a table.

• Tabular form. Data goes in a table arranged so that the date, sample location, constituents, concentrations and observations are readily discernible, and summarized so it is clear whether you are complying with the Order and your NOA. A wall of numbers that a reviewer has to reorganize is not a compliant submittal.
• Copies of the analytical laboratory reports go in with the report. The summary table is not a substitute for them.
• Anything you monitored more often than you had to still gets reported. Results of monitoring done more frequently than the MRP specifies must be reported in the next regularly scheduled report and included in the calculations. This one catches careful operators. If you sample weekly where the Order asks for monthly, all of it is reportable and all of it goes into your averages.

Some regions will instead direct you to submit everything to the State Water Board GeoTracker database. That direction comes from your regional board, so do not assume either route.

Table G-2, Regional Water Board Email Addresses for Electronic Report Submittal, on G-20, in full. Note the number: the Order's own text on G-19 sends you to “Table G-5”, and there is no Table G-5 in Attachment G or anywhere else in the Order. Attachment G contains two numbered tables, G-1 and G-2. The reference is broken; the table below is the one it means.

Central Valley runs three offices and which one covers you is decided by geography, not by anything about your facility. Region 5 is the largest region in the state and sending a report to the wrong office there is a common and avoidable delay. Check which board and office holds you →

Who is allowed to sign

This is where streamlined filings actually go wrong, and it is worth reading properly. The Order says who shall sign, at PDF p. 61 (printed 55). It does not say anywhere what happens to a report signed by somebody else, so do not assume a defective signature is a small thing that can be cured quietly. Ask your board.

• Corporation. A principal executive officer of at least the level of senior vice president.
• Partnership or sole proprietorship. A general partner, or the proprietor.
• Limited liability company. A member or manager given signing authority by the operating agreement. Not simply any member.
• Municipality, state, federal or other public agency. A principal executive officer, or a ranking elected or appointed official.

Anybody else signs as a duly authorized representative, and that only works if three things are true at once. The authorization is in writing by one of the people above. It names an individual or a position with responsibility for the overall operation of the facility, such as a facility manager or superintendent. And the written authorization has been submitted to the regional board. A named position is allowed, which means the authorization survives the person leaving.

Every monitoring report and compliance letter carries a certification signed under penalty of law (G-20). Reports that involve planning, investigation, evaluation or design have a second requirement: they must be prepared by or under the direction of somebody registered to practice in California under Business and Professions Code sections 6735, 7835 and 7835.1, who signs, stamps and gives their registration number (G-19, PDF p. 61, printed 55).

When something goes wrong, the clock is 24 hours

Two separate deadlines, and the first is much shorter than most operators expect (PDF p. 60 to 61, printed 54 to 55).

• Within 24 hours, by telephone or email, from the time you know of a violation or have reason to believe one may occur, where the cause is maintenance work, a power failure, equipment breakdown, an accident from human error or negligence, or something like an act of nature. The same 24 hours applies to a process water containment failure, a spill, or any unauthorized discharge.
• Within 15 days, in writing, unless your regional board directs otherwise. The written notice has to give the date, the time, what happened and why, what you did to correct it and prevent a recurrence, and a timeline for the corrective actions.

Note the phrasing on the 24 hour rule: reason to believe a violation may occur starts the clock too. It is not only a duty to report what has happened.

A hazardous substance or sewage discharged to waters of the state, or where it probably will reach them, is a separate notification to the California Office of Emergency Services under Water Code section 13271.

Two more that are easy to miss. You must promptly report any material change, or proposed change, in the character, location or volume of the discharge. And if you rely on a lease, contract or agreement for disposal, recycling or reuse land to justify your capacity, you must tell the board at least 120 days before it terminates or expires (PDF p. 64, printed 58).

The logs you keep but do not send

Field logs are a category of their own. You maintain them, you summarize them in your monitoring reports, and the actual logs stay with you unless the regional board asks.

• Pond logs. Four things, not one (G-5). Freeboard to the nearest tenth of a foot, weekly. Berm condition weekly, looking specifically for burrowing animals, erosion, cracks and anything else affecting berm integrity. Liner condition when visible, which is a different frequency from the rest, looking for cracks, tears and punctures. And the sampling protocol for dissolved oxygen, which is unusually specific and therefore something an inspector can check: a depth of one foot below the surface, opposite the pond inlet, between 0600 and 0900. Dissolved oxygen, pH and EC run weekly during crush and monthly off season for Tiers 2 and 3, and weekly all year for Tier 4.
• Land application area logs. Field conditions, plus evidence of erosion, saturation, runoff or nuisance conditions such as flies or ponding, plus cropping activity: fertilizer applied in total pounds and pounds per acre, its nitrogen content, crop or landscape planted, planting and harvest dates, crop harvest yield in total wet tons and wet tons per acre, and crop tissue sampling dates and analytical results where you have them (G-7, G-9). The units are in the Order. Dry tons is the wrong number. Tissue results matter beyond the log, because the annual nitrogen balance wants crop uptake rates supported by tissue analysis or a technical reference.
• Subsurface disposal area logs. Erosion, deep rooted plants, burrowing animals, saturation, water surfacing, runoff, odours, flies or ponding. Plus the half operators forget because it is equipment rather than ground: inspect the dosing system, meaning pump controllers, valves and distribution piping, and identify what needs maintenance or repair. Plus a cropping record by field or management unit, which is nearly the land application one but not quite: G-13 does not ask for the harvest yield that G-9 does. Plus, and this is a daily observation so it cannot be reconstructed at year end, the number of wet days (days with process water discharge) and dry days (non-discharge days following wet days) in each discharge cycle, by individual management unit, along with that unit's number, acreage and the volume discharged to it (G-13, G-14).
• Solids logs. A fourth category, and the one operators are most often surprised by (G-15, G-16). Monthly: the source of the process solids, meaning pomace, lees or pond dredging, the amount generated in wet tons, and the disposal or reuse method, such as hauled offsite or land applied onsite. Then, if you land apply solids, the amount by source, the application field number and the area in acres, recorded annually for Tier 2 and monthly for Tiers 3 and 4.

The practical trap is that a summary is only as good as the log behind it, and the log is the thing nobody writes up until the report is due. A pond log with a dissolved oxygen of 10.0 every week of the quarter is the pattern agencies read as a meter that was never taken out of the box.

Sampling and laboratories

Data submitted for compliance has to come from a laboratory accredited by the State Water Board’s Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program, with accreditation specific to the analyses required, under Water Code section 13176 (G-2). The lab must include quality assurance and quality control data in every report.

There is a second route and it is easy to miss. The same sentence continues: or the laboratory must hold a valid certificate of accreditation for equivalent analytical test methods validated for the intended uses and approved by the State Water Board or regional water board. So a lab without ELAP accreditation for your specific analyses is not automatically disqualified. Check which route yours holds before you move your work.

Field tests are exempt from that, which is the part worth knowing. You may use field instruments for pH, electrical conductivity and dissolved oxygen provided the operator is trained in the instrument and it is serviced and calibrated at the manufacturer’s recommended frequency, following the manufacturer’s instructions. Those field calibration reports are the ones kept three years.

Every sample sent to a laboratory needs a completed and signed chain of custody form carrying the sampler, date, time, location, sample type, collection method, bottle type and any preservative, plus the custody trail: date, time, transport method, and to whom the samples were relinquished.

What is actually in an Annual Report

This is the largest single difference between the tiers, and it is much larger than most operators expect.

Tier 1: an abbreviated report, six items

G-21 to G-22. Five of the six are on G-21. The sixth is alone at the top of the next page, which is how it gets missed.

• A scaled site map showing structures, processing areas, solids storage, ponds, land application areas, subsurface disposal areas, water supply wells and monitoring wells, labelled, with field and management unit numbers and acreages.
• Winery effluent monitoring results, with total annual process flow and total days of operation, compared against your facility design flow.
• Any violations during the year, what you did or plan to do about them, and a time schedule.
• Any changes in processing during the year, or planned for next year, that might affect process water flow.
• Any facility or best practicable treatment or control improvements required by your NOA that were begun or completed, or are planned, with an implementation schedule.
• A self-certification that the facility met the Tier 1 criteria during the reporting year, except as noted in item 3, and will meet them in the next reporting year (G-22). This is the one that carries over the page break in the Order, and it is the one that keeps you in Tier 1. It is a forward-looking statement as much as a backward-looking one: if you know next year takes you over a threshold, this is where you cannot say otherwise.

Tiers 2, 3 and 4: thirty nine numbered items

G-22 to G-25. Grouped as Facility Information (items 1 to 4), Source Water (5), Process Water (6 to 8), Pond (9 to 11), Land Application Area (12 to 18), Subsurface Disposal Area (19 to 23), Solids (24 to 29), Groundwater (30 to 34, Tier 4 only) and Compliance Summary (35 to 39, of which item 37 is Tier 4 only).

The items that take real work rather than transcription: an annual nitrogen balance for each field or management unit, showing loading by source, crop uptake rates supported by tissue analysis or a technical reference, and a comparison of nitrogen applied against nitrogen removed by the harvest (item 17). Monthly and total hydraulic loading per management unit (14). Cycle average BOD loading rates including the days in each irrigation cycle (15). And for Tier 4, tables and graphs of current and historical groundwater depth, elevation and constituent concentrations for every well, with a discussion of the trends (31, 33).

Semi-annual reports for Tier 4 are a defined subset of the same content, not a separate exercise: facility information items 1 to 3, process water 6 to 8, pond 9 and 10, land application 12 to 16, subsurface 19 to 23, solids 24 to 29, and compliance 35, 38 and 39, plus groundwater 30 to 34 and item 37 where groundwater monitoring is required (G-21).

Sources, all read directly for this page: Order WQ 2021-0002-DWQ, Monitoring Provisions 2(e) and (f) and Reporting Provisions 3(a) to (c), PDF pp. 60 to 64 (printed 54 to 58); Attachment G, Monitoring and Reporting Program, printed pages G-2, G-5, G-7, G-9, G-13, G-18 to G-25. The Order and Attachment G are both published here →