Haloacetic acids (HAAs) are disinfection byproducts potentially formed during the water treatment cycle, both in municipal water treatment and civilian water treatment. There are over thirty different forms of HAAs, many of which are labeled as suspected carcinogens, with only five being monitored annually in the Kamloops municipal treated water, these being monochloroacetic acid, monobromoacetic acid, dichloroacetic acid, trichloroacetic acid, and dibromoacetic acid. HAAs can be time consuming and unwieldy to detect in real water samples using the standardized EPA method. This project investigated the applicability of dispersive liquid-liquid extraction combined with derivatization followed by GC-MS analysis for the determination of HAAs in water. The developed method was tested on local water samples (swimming pool, hot tub, and tap) and compared to guidelines and literature values which found 5 out of 6 samples to be over the Canadian guidelines.
