How easily can you navigate your facility’s piping systems? Can you quickly locate critical valves to contain a breakdown or contamination? Industrial facilities have complex infrastructure—all too often, intimate knowledge of that infrastructure is limited to a small team—or even just a single staff member. What happens when that staff member is on vacation? What about when they retire? Do you just lose critical knowledge of your facility?
Without that knowledge, your facility may face increased downtime, greater risk of backflow and contamination events, and the threat of lost revenue. Documenting system information should be a priority to protect your facility and its operations—not to mention the health and safety of your employees and customers.
In a recent webinar, “Are Your Facility’s Pipes a Disaster Waiting to Happen?” HydroCorp experts Gary McLaren, Cooper Nicholas, and Dan Lemon discussed how regular, repeated piping system surveys and up-to-date piping schematics can reduce downtime, optimize maintenance, and save money in manufacturing and other industrial facilities.
Avoidable Disasters
Your pipes play a role in the health, safety, and operation of your facility. From water, chemicals, compressed air, and gases used in the manufacturing process to employee drinking water, industrial piping systems carry critical substances—and contamination can be disastrous. All too often, systems with undetected and unprotected cross-connections result in health and safety issues, downtime, and lost revenue:
- In the 2000s, a meat processing plant in Nebraska mistakenly connected a mislabeled non-potable water line to the potable supply, leading to ammonia contamination and requiring a costly production shut down.
- In 2013, an unprotected cross-connection and loss of system pressure resulted in a backflow event, contaminating the water supply and halting production in an Ohio automotive manufacturing plant.
- In 2019, process water in a Georgia chicken processing plant was found to contain high levels of chlorine due to a cross-connection issue, contaminating the product.
- In 2020, an unprotected cross-connection caused heavy metal contamination of the potable water supply in a metal plating facility in Illinois.
- In 2022, a mislabeled pipe resulted in a cross-connection and contamination that affected product safety in a New York cosmetics manufacturing facility.
“It doesn’t necessarily need to be a disaster: It could be a leak. It could be a small pipe burst. It could be a cross-contamination causing product defects,” Lemon explains. Whatever the problem—or potential problem—it’s possible to mitigate, and even prevent, these disasters. Industrial facilities large and small have complex piping systems that require ongoing observation, documentation, and maintenance. Knowledge of these systems is the first step.
A Plan to Manage Critical Piping Infrastructure
“When we start to look closely at piping systems in facilities, we find non-compliant, potentially hazardous issues,” McLaren says. Facilities need reliable documentation and systems to effectively manage their piping systems—from potable water to chemicals to compressed air systems.
Drawings, maps, and schematics that are limited or out-of-date (if they exist), and hard copies that sit on a shelf can’t help facility managers, maintenance managers, or operational staff ensure safety, efficiency, and optimization. While limited documentation may be cheap up front, the long-term costs—from downtime, excess maintenance, and system recovery—make this path far more expensive.
You should create a plan, a system, to manage your piping infrastructure. This plan should outline how often you’ll conduct visual surveys to stay up to date with structural changes, how often you’ll update your schematics, and how various teams within your facility will utilize that documentation. “It’s all about being preventive, about getting a plan established before something happens,” Nicholas says.
Regular Surveys
The first step to protecting and managing industrial piping systems is conducting regular, recurring surveys—on-site. In addition to ensuring your piping documentation is accurate, surveys identify:
- Valve locations and access
- Incorrect pipe markers and labeling
- Pipe size, flow direction and piping contents
- Dead-leg piping
By staying current on the status of pipes throughout your systems, how they work, and how they connect to one another, you can prevent contamination, ensure the presence of proper backflow prevention, and perform maintenance effectively. Remember: On-the-ground knowledge of your piping systems is essential in reducing downtime, responding to emergencies, and operating efficiently.
Reliable Schematics
“It’s about having that one source of truth,” Nicholas explains. “Having that up-to-date, accurate snapshot of your facility as is.” Useful and reliable piping schematics have:
- Easily referenceable nomenclature
- A color-coded legend
- A complete picture of:
- Pressure reducers and regulators
- Emergency shut-off valves
- Points of use and connections
- System flow directions and labeling
- Valve tag references and labeling
- Backflow preventers
To adhere to best practices—and maintain the utmost security and efficiency for your facility—set a timeline for when you’ll re-survey and update your schematics. This helps you maintain current knowledge of your piping systems, enabling effective response when the threat of contamination or downtime looms. Different facility sizes require different update frequencies:
- 50,000 – 100,000 sq. ft. facilities should re-survey piping systems every three years.
- 100,001 – 500,000 sq. ft. facilities should re-survey piping systems every two years.
- Facilities over 500,000 sq. ft. should re-survey piping systems annually.
A Definite ROI
With recent, relevant, and accurate information about your piping systems, “we avoid disasters, and we stay ahead of incidents that cause downtime,” McLaren says. High-cost impacts, from potable water contamination to product contamination to plant downtime can be mitigated or avoided entirely. Regular surveys and updated schematics provide various departments with the resources they need to maintain and manage industrial piping systems effectively.
Want to learn how HydroCorp can support industrial facilities’ with on-site surveys, piping schematic development, and water management programs?
