Fundamental issues surrounding hygiene have been relevant to human populations for thousands of years. Nowadays many of those issues have been made invisible for most of us, replaced instead by fears of cybercrime and road traffic incidents.

It’s important to start off by stating that yes, water safety is absolutely still an important issue that business and premises owners need to be aware of. The same bacteria and viruses that ravaged populations thousands of years ago still exist, they’re just largely under control.

While they’re not as present in our lives, bacteria such as Legionella pneumophila still regularly result in outbreaks of serious disease. It only takes a single slip-up in water system maintenance for bacteria to proliferate to dangerous levels, potentially resulting in disaster.

Legal Requirements

While the risk of waterborne disease is clearly still an issue, whose responsibility is it to take care of these things? In the UK, all parties that operate material premises, whether a private business or a public institution, are required to provide access to safe, potable water at all times.

Generally, ensuring the provision of potable water means that you’ll need to have a well-planned and practically implementable water safety plan in place. Your water safety plan will be a document that ties your overarching approach together, detailing everything from how you’re identifying potential risks to who is responsible for different areas of water safety.

Practical Measures

In terms of the practical measures you’ll need to put in place, what these look like might depend on the kind of premises you’re operating. For example, if you need to store and handle highly toxic chemicals on the premises, this will have an impact on how the water system is designed and where people access taps.

In most cases, ensuring water safety will necessitate ongoing testing of environmental factors such as temperature and water flow. Based on the results of these ongoing tests, you’ll then potentially need to take further action, whether that’s changing the temperature of a water storage unit or ensuring adequate flow to avoid stagnation.

Remain Adaptive

Just as there’s no single one-size-fits-all solution to water safety, you need to recognise that an approach that might have once been perfect for your organisation won’t remain perfect forever. You will need to adapt your approach to ensure that it remains relevant and appropriate for the risks you’re facing, working hard to avoid complacency.

We hope that this has reinstituted water safety as an important and relevant concern in your eyes. For business owners in particular, it simply isn’t something that you can afford to overlook, with catastrophic implications should things get out of hand. Luckily, as we’ve seen there is an impressive range of solutions available, making risk management easier than ever before.