False cyanide formation during drinking water sample preservation and storage

Carefully controlled bench-scale and on-site experiments demonstrated that cyanide can form in the treated drinking water sample container during preservation and storage. In the bench-scale experiment, treated tap water samples were collected on 20 days over six months. The tap water samples were split and some of the splits were spiked with formaldehyde, a known ozone disinfection byproduct, held for three hours and tested for cyanide. Then they were preserved and held for 2-10 days. None of the 69 initial samples had cyanide detects, but 22 of 49 formaldehyde-spiked samples and three of the 20 unspiked samples developed detectable cyanide concentrations during storage. In the on-site experiment, six samples were collected at a finished water tap at an ozone/chloramination treatment plant over three days. Each sample was split, and a portion was spiked with formaldehyde. Each portion was analyzed in triplicate after three different procedures: (1) immediately distilled on-site, (2) stabilized on-site in a distillation tube and distilled back at the laboratory several days later, or (3) following the conventional procedure of preserving the sample to pH > 12 in a container and distilling the sample back at the laboratory. Only the samples handled in the conventional way had detectable amounts of cyanide. Both experiments demonstrated that cyanide can form during conventional preservation and storage, and it is likely that the cyanide detected for this treated drinking water was formed in the sample container as a consequence of the preservation and storage conditions.