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Six Steps To Develop A Water Safety Plan And Comply With ASHRAE Standard 188-2015 – Legionella – A Canadian Perspective

Your water systems harbor biological growth that can cause serious health issues. The CDC National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System continues to show an increase in infections from Legionella. Since 2001, the number of instances have increased from less than 0.5 to 2.5 incidences per 100,000 population in 2018.

With heightened awareness around sanitization and respiratory health, it is important to consider your water system in your safety plan and to educate your teams in current water chemistry hygiene standards.

ASHRAE’s standard on Legionella risk management was launched in 2015. This comprehensive best practice document has also become the legal benchmark. Canada is not immune to this moral and legal due diligence. Complying to this standard does not need to be complicated.

The following six steps outline what you need to do to Develop A Water Safety Plan and Comply with ASHRAE Standard 188-2015 – Legionella.

STEP 1: Water Safety Team

To comply with ASHRAE Standard 188, the building owner or designee must first form a Water Safety Team. This team will be responsible for managing the compliance process now and throughout the building’s life.

STEP 2: Water System Flow Diagram

The team’s first responsibility is to create a Water System Flow Diagram. This diagram is intended to highlight all the water processing steps in the building, where water changes physical and or chemical properties.

STEP 3: Risk Management Plan

Next, the team is required to prepare a Risk Management Plan. The goal of this document is to identify all critical “Control Locations”, the monitoring procedures or “Control Measures” for each of those locations, and the appropriate “Control Limits” – as well as pre-planned corrective actions in the event the system drifts outside the predefined “Control Limits”.

STEP 4: Verification

The next steps are to ensure the plan is executed. The verification and validation steps have been confusing in the past. The verification is the act of confirming the plan is being implemented as designed. It can simply be a checklist confirming the control measures are being monitored as planned.

STEP 5: Validation

The validation is the confirmation that the plan is achieving its intended goal. Is the site minimizing the health risk? This can be done by disease surveillance. It can also be done by periodic Legionella sampling by culture. It is up to the team to define the appropriate validation method. The Standard does discuss best practices if sampling by culture is used as a method.

STEP 6: Documentation

Finally, the team is required to maintain documentation to verify that the plan is being properly implemented and to validate that the plan is achieving its disease risk reduction goal. Part of this documentation management process may be revisions to the flow diagram or plan as changes occur in the facility.

Conclusions

More information is available on technologies and methods for your facility to enhance their Water Safety Plan. However, the best way to ensure your facility is in compliance with ASHRAE Standard 188-2015 – Legionella, is to follow the six steps above. We suggest you try to keep it simple to start and reach out to learn more about how AquaAnalytics can be leveraged to make the implementation and documentation of your plan as easy and seamless as possible.

Categories:  Water Treatment