Hospitality business owners, schools and other enterprises can now benefit from Water Source Australia's work to digitise and simplify the process of establishing and maintaining a WQSP.
What many hospitality industry owner-operators, school principals, and other seemingly unrelated professionals have in common is that they can discover the hard way that they alone are held responsible for the drinkable quality of water at their premises.
In Australia or New Zealand, it doesn’t ultimately matter that local authorities might have vouched for the quality of the river you’re drawing water from, that a dam upstream is considered safe or even that the water coming out of the taps is via a recognised water authority. If a complaint is made and that water is found to be responsible for illness among a company’s customers, it’s on the business owner.
All such companies are expected to have a Water Quality Safety Plan (WQSP) available when asked for, which is why Water Source Australia is here to help.
‘We consider it unreasonable that a school principal is expected to know how to research, craft and present an acceptable Water Quality Safety Plan, on top of all their other responsibilities,’ said Water Source chief executive officer, Mark Campbell. ‘WQSP’s are complex and need to be regularly revisited. It’s not something a restaurant owner or other small business owner can be expected to easily tick off. That’s why we simplified the process and digitised it.’
Water Source Australia’s new Brolga water filtration system comes complete with the ELEIoT monitoring and management system, driven by Internet of Things (IoT) smarts, and the Brolga also offers a digital, step-by-step WQSP module as an optional extra, for this reason.
‘There are states and territories right now where the education department facilities, by which I mean schools, are non-compliant with the same government’s water guidelines and drinking water acts,’ Water Source Australia’s sales engineer Michael Husy said. ‘It’s such a burden and requires specialist knowledge to build. Across states, in the relevant food and hygiene acts that cover cafes and restaurants, it’s in the fine print that the business owners are responsible for providing clean drinking water, and they have to be able to prove it.
‘We know the Brolga is going to be a huge asset for a lot of these businesses, by delivering drinkable water, and we saw the opportunity to also assist with the WQSP requirements.’
Michael said risk assessments originated in the US military, where conflict sites were investigated via what came to be known as a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), examining how likely a failure was to occur, and how could it be mitigated. NASA, Ford and other major American organisations embraced this safety check, until the concept of a FMEA morphed into an assessment of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP).
HACCP has now infiltrated all the way to the drinking water supplies of specific small businesses needing to be provably compliant on request from the relevant authorities.
‘As part of the Brolga, or as a standalone offering, we have developed a cloud-based system, to ensure all risk assessments are completed and up to date,’ Michael said. ‘It enables normal businesspeople who are not experts to tick off what needs to be done and to have their WQSP in an up-to-date printable form that they can hand any water authority who arrives to check their water source.’
‘A water safety plan is never finished,’ Michael added. ‘Our cloud system is designed like an infinity loop because it needs to be continuously monitored and adapted. But we do that with a team of specialists so that Water Source can bring in laboratories, local water quality experts, geology experts and others, as required, to bring the thorough research and understanding a true WQSP demands.’
Image: Casey Kent Austockphoto
