SAN DIEGO - About 70 people took part Saturday in the San Diego portion of the third annual "California Coastal Snapshot Day," a mass collection of water samples from many waterways in the state.

The event here, sponsored by the San Diego Citizen Watershed Monitoring Consortium and UCSD, sent volunteers as far north as Oceanside and as far south as Mexico, organizer Hiram Sarabia said.

Volunteers received hours of training before they were sent out to collect water samples and run some basic tests before the vials are sent to a lab for further analysis, Sarabia said.

"It's a great educational experience," Sarabia said.

According to Sarabia, only about 20 percent of water bodies in the region are tested for water quality and health standards. No data is collected on more than 80 percent of the waterways in the area, he added.

The results will be posted in a few weeks on the consortium Web page, www.sdcwmc.org.

"It's a lot of information but it's going to be worthwhile," Sarabia said.