Water Quality & Legionella Testing.
Legionnaire’s disease is a form of pneumonia contracted when legionella bacteria contaminated water is inhaled.
There are an estimated 200 new cases of legionnaires’ disease in the UK each year with about 20% of these being fatal. The largest ever single outbreak of Legionnaires' disease was in Murcia Spain, July 2001 with 650 Cases and 4 Deaths.
Cooling towers, manufacturing processes and domestic hot and cold water systems are all susceptible to legionella colonization, and employees, visitors and contractors using the water systems are at risk of developing legionnaire’s disease.
Legionella risk assessment & testing is a legal requirement and we can support you by advising on the correct legislation, regulations and codes of practice.
We will assess the risk by examining each part of the water system, ensuring it is clean, designed and operating in compliance with guidance. We will provide a pdf report including illustrative photographs, system schematics and an easy to follow summary of non-compliance and remedial measures to ensure safe operation.
If your water tanks do not comply with guidance or they are affected by scale and sediment or have poor fitting or missing lids without vents or screens we can rectify this for you.
We also prepare management policies and schemes in word or excel format site specific logbooks for recording ongoing monitoring so that you are not left to manage the system without guidance. Our excel format helps guide your maintenance staff through their duties and flags any non-compliances. The logbook can be audited on-line and all records can be sent to us to collate, manage and advise.
We provide legionella awareness training for management and maintenance so you understand your monitoring responsibilities and there after we will prepare an ongoing monitoring proposal for you that will include regular log-book auditing and legionella sampling as necessary.
Once a risk assessment has been completed remedial action including cleaning and disinfection can eliminate any immediate non-compliance. A risk assessment is a live document, not a one-off exercise, and needs to be reviewed regularly, ideally in anticipation of changes. For example, the risk assessment for a new construction ought to be performed before commissioning, but then reviewed when the system has been operating normally for several weeks or months.