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Editor’s note: Today we’re launching Matthew Leonard’s new column that will use public data to explore important issues and promote accountability and transparency. Matthew is Civil Beat’s data editor and he’s been particularly interested in data that’s available for the Maui wildfires. In the first of these regular columns, he brings us a story about data that has become important to the residents of Upcountry Maui.

Kula resident Melissa Kaufman used her Labor Day long weekend to do some reading.

Rather than kicking back with a beach book or reading “Charlotte’s Web” with her first-grader, Kaufman binged on the water sample reports posted by Maui County for areas impacted by the Upper Kula and Olinda wildfires.

If that wasn’t enough, she then organized the results into a and on social media, providing information that Kaufman says residents desperately want.

“I’m the mother of a 6-year-old boy. I’m very conservative when it comes to issues like water contamination. So it was really important to me to understand what was going on with the water for my own family,” she said.

Lahaina and Upper Kula have been under an since Aug. 11 and the county has regularly issued the results of water samples tested for contamination, but most people wouldn’t know how to , she said.

Kaufman, who has a background in tech and now teaches entrepreneurship at high school and college level, also wanted to reduce the anxiety she was feeling in the community. “Some people are afraid to wash their hands with the tap water. I see others online attributing every malady or malaise to the water.”

The spreadsheet she put together added context about the for the three , benzene, toluene and xylene, that were showing up in the county reports that could pose health risks if found in sufficient concentrations.

“For the data they’ve provided, I’m not seeing anything concerning,” she said.

Eleven of the 58 Kula-Olinda reports showed traces of the VOCs, but none exceeded the EPA limits, she found.

The highest reading for benzene was .72 micrograms per liter. The EPA’s limit is 5 micrograms per liter. For comparison, Kaufman said that water tests after the Camp Fire in California found benzene levels more than 400 times the EPA limits.

“Now the things I don’t know are, how much testing should be done and how long should we be testing for?” she said.

Looking for answers, Kaufman had an authority on water contamination help her translate the county reports and cast an eye over her findings.

“I have people calling and emailing me from 4,500 miles away asking these questions,” said Professor Andrew Whelton of Purdue University, who advised on water supply recovery after the Red Hill fuel leak and major wildfires on the mainland.

He said Kaufman’s spreadsheet was helpful because it put all the county results into one place.

They show additional benzene contamination in Lahaina as expected, Whelton said, but that none of the detections so far in any of the water systems exceed safety guidelines.

Whelton is familiar with local concerns after he and a colleague spent 10 days in Maui in mid-August providing advice to the county on testing as well as meeting local residents. The pace of water testing in the advisory area has picked up since he was on the ground, Whelton said.

Director of the Department of Water Supply John Stufflebean said Tuesday that the department is currently doing 30 to 40 samples per day and that the Unsafe Water Advisory could be lifted in some parts of Upcountry later this week if results continue to be satisfactory.

Stufflebean said that lifting the advisory for the area around fire-damaged homes was likely several weeks away. Two rounds of testing plus a final round of clearance testing are required and there is a one-week gap between results from each round, he said.

“Once they test the water in and around the destroyed homes,” Whelton said, “as well as the pipe that transfers water from the top to the bottom of the water system, and they do that a couple of times, then they would be able to understand if there’s any contamination still moving around in the system.”

When Whelton first arrived Maui County was testing for up to 23 of the VOCs the state was asking it to test for, he said. On his advice, the county changed to start testing for 55 chemicals. “Sometimes it takes utilities a month or two before they figure out how to do the testing the right way. Maui County was able to figure it out faster.”

Whelton strongly advises residents getting their water tested privately to check that the labs are screening for enough VOCs, he said.

During meetings with households on Maui, Whelton found out “that commercial laboratories are testing people’s water and charging them 200 to 250 bucks without looking for all the chemicals they need to look for.”

This was something that he’d seen in the aftermath of other wildfires in California and Oregon. “People are trying to test and get control of their lives. But they don’t have the information needed to get the lab to test correctly, and the laboratory may be oblivious to what they actually have to do to help people.”

Whelton has produced a guide on , as well as a , well owners and public health officials.

Kaufman sees an opportunity to merge the private test results, done correctly, with what the county has been doing, because more data is always better, right?

“So if anyone is doing independent testing or if the county or independent researchers will do more sampling and provide all that data together, it would give us a helpful picture for what’s going on with the water,” she said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.