Ah, I've worked in a bottle facility for a couple years (and before that municipal water system) . I can probably help you with this, but I'm in the US to it might be a little different, as bottle water is FDA and public water is EPA. Mostly mimicking Sushil -
The water is not treated in house to any degree (apart from the addition of CO2 to the sparkling type as such) and comes from the mains public supply via the local water authorty, into the hotel holding tanks and then feeds into the bottling plant.
Obvioulsy the incoming water must be potable and one would assume that to be the case from the water authority, the hazard being that it might not be and the control being we would expect the authority to contact us to make it known if it was not. Does this ie contamination from source such as oocyts, heavy metals etc become a CCP or is it part of a pre-requisite programme?
Welcome any thoughts on this.
Kind regards
Tim
At the plant I'd test incoming city water weekly for micro & Chlorine - but in the states city water is chlorinated up to 2 ppm . Some areas add fluoride to the water as well, for the children.
We had a carbon filtering system, O2 system, UV, and a distiller, so a few more CCPs. Heavy metal, TDS, bromate/bromide, arsenic etc were tested on a semi-annual basis.
Here the city must make available to the public their micro and chemistry testing results, and if you call your local city water department, they give them to you for the closest sampling point. They should have a lot of micro & chem data .
However, here, the public water is only guaranteed to the curb - meaning the pipes you have installed from the city to your plant can be damaged, allowing in contamination, and react (if they are old pipes they might not be made of a good material and can cause leeching/reaction), so you have to test the water that you are actually using in your process. As a side note, the city was mandated to test water from a random sample of local homes quarterly to ensure that even if the owners had ancient pipes, the drinking water levels would still be safe.
PSA (Public Service Announcement): After working in both private and public drinking water sectors, I can say that I drink from the tap (NEVER THE COOLER) every time. Clean your office's water dispenser by running chlorine through it. Right now. It's gross inside. Your poor employees!