Build a water management program outline

The seven elements, and what each one is asking

The structure below is the one the CDC toolkit uses and the one the builder follows. It is worth reading before filling anything in, because most of the difficulty is in understanding what is being asked rather than in writing the answer.

1. 1. A team, not a document owner

   People who between them know the plumbing, the operations and the occupants, named individually. This is the element programs most often skip, and the one that makes the rest possible: every later step ends in somebody deciding something.

2. 2. The systems, and how water moves

   Every system that holds or moves water, and the path from the point it enters the building to the point somebody uses it. The standard expects a process flow diagram. Writing the path out in words is how you find out what you do not actually know about the building.

3. 3. Where control measures apply

   The places in those systems where conditions can favor growth: warm stagnant volumes, dead legs, long runs to distal outlets, basins out of the flow. Naming a location commits you to nothing about what is there. It commits you to watching it.

4. 4. Monitoring

   For each location, what gets measured, against what limit, how often, by whom, and where the reading is written down. The limit is the team's decision for this building. There is no national number, and anyone who hands you one without seeing the building is guessing.

5. 5. Corrective actions

   What happens when a reading falls outside the limit. Decided in advance it is a procedure; decided afterwards it is an explanation, and the difference is visible to anyone who later reads the file.

6. 6. Verification and validation

   Two questions that get collapsed into one. Verification asks whether the program is being carried out as written. Validation asks whether it is working, and this is where environmental sampling belongs, as evidence about the program rather than a verdict on the building.

7. 7. Documentation and communication

   Where the records live, how long they are kept, and who is told what. Unglamorous, and the element that decides whether the previous six can be shown to have happened.

Why the team comes before the sampling

The commonest way a building gets this wrong is to order a round of samples first and write the program afterwards, on the theory that the results will say what the program should contain. They will not. A sample answers one question, at one point, on one day, and without a program there is nothing to compare it against and no agreed action if it comes back high.

Doing it in the other order costs less and reads better to anyone who later asks to see the file. The program names the locations that matter, states what will be monitored and how often, and says what happens when a limit is missed. Sampling then has a job: showing whether the program is working, which is the validation step at element six.

What to do with the PDF

Take it to the people who would be on the team and use it as an agenda. The gaps listed on the last page are the agenda items, and they are usually the places where nobody has yet decided who is responsible. When the team has settled those, the document stops being a draft, and that moment is a decision someone has to make rather than a file someone has to download.

When you reach validation and need the analysis run, the laboratories enrolled in the CDC ELITE proficiency program are listed on this site, by state, with the distinction between enrolment and accreditation set out plainly. What a sample can and cannot establish is on sampling and laboratory analysis, and what drives the price is on testing cost.