Sanitary Survey Checklist

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) defines a sanitary survey of a water system as an “…on-site review of a public water system’s water source, facilities, equipment, operation, and maintenance.”  For a community water system, they require that a survey be done at least every three years.  They further go on to identify eight areas that are covered by the sanitary survey:

• water sources
• treatment
• distribution systems
• finished water storage
• pumps, pump facilities and controls
• monitoring, reporting and data verification
• water system management and operations
• operator compliance with state requirements 

Most if not all states will have similar requirements for periodic sanitary surveys covering these same elements as a part of implementing the Federal Groundwater Rule, compliance with which was to have begun on December 1, 2009. 

A large part of any sanitary survey is the inspection of treatment and distribution system equipment to ensure there are no defects that could compromise the quality or reliability of the water being served to the public.  Water systems should take a very proactive approach to these inspections, conducting periodic in-house inspections in addition to the inspections done by state or other regulators.  Many industry professionals think having an operator go to each plant site every day is sufficient, but operators are busy people and may not have time to inspect all the elements involved in a thorough sanitary survey.  And it’s always good to have someone besides the operator conduct the survey; a fresh set of eyes and a different perspective can often turn up issues that may otherwise have gone unintentionally overlooked.

It always helps in this sort of effort to have a good checklist you can work off of that covers all or most of the basic elements to be reviewed.  A checklist will help make sure nothing is missed and that the surveys are conducted consistently between plant sites and over time for the same plant site.  That last point is important to make sure any issues discovered in the survey are being addressed and not resulting in repeat deficiencies. To help me with the sanitary surveys I conduct in California, I went through a long list of references, including the California Title 22 regulations; Department of Water Resources well construction bulletins; and AWWA standards, and came up with my own checklist.  Those are available in this Excel file for you to look over, use, share, or modify to meet your needs.

This checklist also includes some basic health and safety elements, along with some hazardous material and hazardous waste elements that your local CUPA might inspect for.  For each item in the checklist, I've included the reference.   If there is no reference, that means either I couldn't find one, of that the item is just what I feel is a best management practice and doesn't have a regulatory reference.  If you can’t access the checklist for some reason, of if it’s in a format you can’t read, just contact me and I’ll try to provide the information for you in a different way.

I’d really appreciate any feedback you have on this checklist, including any suggestions for improvements or just comments on what you think in general. You can either comment right on this blog, or send me an e-mail.  Hopefully this check list will help keep your water systems running smoothly.