From the NJAL Archive:

New Jersey Analytical Laboratories was featured in U.S. 1 Newspaper.

Drinking a glass of water can be a precarious matter in New Jersey, as Jamie Latham and Allen Thomas know well. These two ex-Envirogen employees have taken groundwater and well water samples that would scare the bejeezus out of anyone. "The worst I've ever seen is in Linden," says Latham. "We took a groundwater sample, opened the lid, and brown fumes came up."

While water treatment plants filter out most of the contaminants lingering in New Jersey's water sources, well water can be more risky, a concern that prompted the state assembly to pass a bill last May requiring homeowners to test their well water for contaminants when they sell or lease a home. All that unsavory news is easier to wash down, however, knowing that environmental scientists like Latham and Thomas are keeping watch. New Jersey Analytical Laboratories, a start-up the two scientists launched at 1590 Reed Road, provides drinking water analysis to homeowners and environmental or industry groups alike.

An environmental testing lab isn't your usual kind of start-up, but Latham and Thomas, who have been friends practically since childhood, says there is plenty of work to be done. "In the early 1980s, with the environmental regulations like Superfund, there was a tremendous amount of money poured into making industries more environmentally friendly," says Thomas. "Over the years, with some easing of the regulations, labs had lowered their prices, and the market was saturated, dragging the lab prices down so low that many consolidated or left. The environmental economy really drilled many out, and in the last year we've seen that lab pricing is now starting to rise back up. At the same time, the state and federal limitations have been getting stricter. Our drinking water is a limited resource, and environmental contaminants are becoming more prevalent because there's more industry." Meanwhile, now that water companies must issue annual water quality reports, consumers are starting to be more educated.

Earlier this year, environmentalists analyzing federal data concluded that somewhere between 700,000 and 1.6 million New Jersey residents are drinking tap water with unsafe levels of arsenic. Latham and Thomas have often found MTBEs (an additive in gasoline that mixes easily with water) and other volatile organic materials lingering around well water systems. "These gas stations have old tanks that have leaked, and that goes into drinking water around the town," says Thomas. "The worst that I have seen is a strong presence of gasoline, MTBE, and TCE, a chemical degreaser used by dry cleaners that was popular in the 1950s. It's ultimately taken off the market, but what was dumped in the ground is still there." "You wouldn't believe how many people have had that in their drinking water," says Latham. "There's no doubt about it, it's a carcinogen, and you don't want to be drinking it. It's a relatively cheap system to purify the water, you just have to know if it's there. That's our part."

Earth, wind, and water all fall under the domain of NJAL. Latham and Thomas can analyze drinking water, waste water, groundwater from naturally occurring aquifers, soil samples, and finally air. With $200,000 worth of high-tech equipment ("We have our houses in it and every penny saved," says Latham), they can analyze bacteria levels, pH, salts, minerals, nutrients, and residue levels in any given sample, and can also spot volatile organics (such as MTBE) and the presence of dangerous metals such as mercury, lead and arsenic. Oddly enough, only one out of the five employees that work here need to be out in the field on any given day. "Laboratories operate differently from other businesses," says Thomas. "You can run around and do your sales and quoting during the day, and the lab runs itself at night and we evaluate it the next day."

NJAL is certified by the State of New Jersey and competes for contracts by state organizations, but they currently have a dozen private contracts, including a $50,000 stream study for a large environmental consulting firm in Princeton and a job with an environmental engineering firm in Central Jersey worth $200,000. The company also does a lot of work for private homeowners and has six or seven home inspection companies on their client list. When NJAL opened in February, Thomas and Latham already had a line at the door. In 1994 the two had been hired to build a analytical program at Envirogen, the environmental remediation company at 4100 Quakerbridge Road. Although the lab supported a corps of engineers in research and development, Envirogen never intended to get into the commercial lab market, says Thomas, which was why he and Latham left. "We had to turn away so much work because Envirogen was not in the lab business," he says, "and obviously Jamie and I wanted to be."

Since 1988, in fact, Thomas and Latham have been on parallel tracks -- in 1988, they met at Chyun Associates in Princeton, a lab under the directorship of Mike Wright, and in 1991 both hopped over to Envirogen. There's even some evidence to suggest that the link between these two entrepreneurs goes back further.

Thomas attended Ewing High and earned his BS in biology from Rider, Class of 1988. He and his wife Robin have two children. Latham grew up in Pennington and Lambertville and went to high school in Hopewell. He earned his degree in biology from Rutgers University, Class of 1990, and is married to a special education teacher. Both their fathers were engineers at RCA in the 1960s, and Latham and Thomas say they've known "of" each other since the late 1970s.

While studying biology, however, Thomas was also serving as in the Army Reserve, which gave him an unusual perspective on his profession. "When I first started out in the industry I just looked at the testing job as a job," says Thomas, "but while I was going through college, I was trying to understand about life and the natural balance in the environment. When you get into environmental analysis, you discover the contaminants that ruin that process. I'm a major in the Army Reserve so I have a chance to see a lot of places in the world that people can't see, that are pristine and untouched, and that has an impact when you come to New Jersey, which is so densely packed. Everything you use from shampoo to laundry detergent has to be dealt with to make it pure again." Even before Thomas and Latham had an office or lab, two clients had given them letters of commitment. The pair installed everything with their bare hands on nights and weekends. Thomas' wife is the office manager. Most of the office is funded through their savings, but the partners also received some commercial back-up. "We pretty much we knew where to get the equipment for the best price," says Thomas. "If we use the best tools, we can put our resources better elsewhere."

Although strictly in the business of testing, Thomas, for his part, would like to play a role in cleaning up the heavily industrialized areas in northern Jersey around Carteret. "A lot of the samples that I've analyzed are scary," says Thomas. "It's hard to understand how someone could contaminate the earth in that way and just leave it, just pour pure chemicals down the drain. We've all seen samples that are just completely toxic. When we do the environmental engineering analysis, we're playing an integral role in cleaning up."