Water safety and your business - What you need to know

This is a collaborative post

It’s easy to overlook the importance of water safety in a business. As long as the wet stuff continues to flow, most people happily forget about it and let it get on with its job of heating the pipes and supplying the water for tea time. But in the background, risks lurk – some of them deadly.

Chief among these risks is Legionella, a water-borne bacterium that can cause all kinds of nasty illnesses, including Legionnaires’ disease and Pontiac fever. A bout of illness will result in a visit from the Health and Safety Executive (HSA) and, in some cases, steep fines or even imprisonment, especially if Legionella is contracted. It’s therefore imperative that you understand the law and what you can do to keep your water sources and storage tanks bacteria-free.

Here’s how.

Breeding Grounds

• When it comes to water safety, it’s important to understand where issues tend to arise. As a rule of thumb, water-borne nasties will breed in the following conditions:
• Where there is a supply of stagnant water, typically found in dead legs, water reservoirs and little-used outlets.
• Where the water is not too hot – a temperature somewhere between 20–45°C will encourage bacterial growth.
• Where the pipes and storage places are ‘nutrient-rich’ in rust, scale, or sludge.

Photo credit Sasikan Ulevik via Unsplash

Risk Assessment

The key to keeping on top of water safety and Legionella control is the risk assessment. It’s often the case that a business doesn't have the know-how to do it itself, and so has to bring in an outside specialist like the people at the Water Hygiene Centre to help here.

At a minimum, the risk assessment should:

• Map the topography and layout of the pipes, storage and outlets.
• Identify high-risk areas of the premises that are liable to breed Legionella and other harmful pathogens.
• Test water temperatures to ensure the hot water is being kept at above 60 °C and outlets deliver hot water above 50 °C within one minute, while the cold water temperatures are below 20 °C after one minute of running.
• Evaluate existing control measures (temperature checks, flushing regimes and disinfectant procedures) and update them if gaps in the regime are identified.
• Ensure that water safety compliance documents and records are being maintained properly, stored and auditable.

Review

The risk assessment isn’t a one-and-done exercise. A new risk assessment will need to be carried out frequently to ensure the control measures you have in place are up to the job of keeping your water safe. As such, it’s recommended that a fresh risk assessment be carried out at least every two years.

A fresh risk assessment is especially important if the water system changes (new pipes are introduced or onsite renovations are performed), if Legionella is detected, or if the building has high-risk water systems – hospitals, care homes and hotels fall into this bracket.

Day-to-Day

The good news is that the day-to-day job of managing and controlling water risk is fairly straightforward once the risk assessment has been carried out. The law says that the day-to-day management of the water system should be carried out by a person nominated as the ‘responsible person’ or RP. It’s the RP’s job to perform the control measures and keep on top of the high-risk parts of the premises identified in the risk assessment.

Conclusion

Water safety doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require a methodical approach to risk management. Indeed, at the heart of any water safety regime lies the risk assessment. Get that right and the day-to-day business of keeping your water supply bacteria-free should be plain sailing.