TABLE OF CONTENTS Water is an essential service to any facility. The amount and quality needed vary considerably between different plants, but the essential fact important to all engineers who have to deal with water technology is that the subject of water quality and treatment is highly specialized. It deals with chemistry and microbiology, and even within those fields the technology is specialized and in the hands of experts. It is therefore a field in which plant engineers cannot be expert, and are forced to take advice from specialists. These are usually suppliers of plant or chemicals, or professional consultants.
These specialists are in a position of great responsibility, because plant engineers are so dependent on their advice. In these circumstances it is possible for cowboy organizations to thrive. Past and present experience shows that these are too common. Plant engineers must not automatically accept the lowest offer for materials or advice in this field but must first be satisfied with the specialists' competence and integrity.
There are many sad examples of installations which have gone disastrously wrong, and these are by no means limited to small facilities or those in which water is a relatively unimportant service. For example, manufacture of microchips is wholly dependent on a supply of highly purified water. In recent years two of the largest UK manufacturers, sited at opposite ends of the country, have had to shut down and send the workforce home because their purified water facility had...
