In mid January 2025 there was in the north wales area, where I both live and work a major shortage of water. Now those who have ever been to north wales will know it always rains in Wales. So how can there have been a shortage of water? Those who know where I live and work know it’s right on the coast so there should be no shortage of water.
However, on Wednesday 15th January 2025 a major underground pipe cracked after recent frost leading to emptying of all underground storage of water for North Wales. This affected 40 thousand homes and businesses. Enough water to fill around 1000 Olympic swimming pools was lost. The problem took 3 full days to fix the leak, a further 2 days to refill the tanks and several days until water supplies were in a drinkable state with many places such as schools closed because the water was not yet safe to drink.
Although it was reported in the news briefly (see BBC link here), a recent Middle East peace deal and the inauguration of Trump to the White House that week, naturally dominated all the national and international headlines. So unless you actually lived in the area you probably never knew what happened.
So what happened and what has this got to do with oil analysis?
I will come onto the relevance to oil analysis in a minute I promise, but the preparedness of the local authorities was, shall we say, less than ideal. Bottled water supplies were spent within a couple hours and some people went 3 days with no bottled water deliveries from Welsh water (the water authority). When a bottle station finally opened there were reported 2 mile tailbacks and all shops were sold out of bottled water. Those shops with water selling at up to 1000% markup and many forced to close. Many schools closed, with as little as 18 minutes notice to pick up your children. Hospitals discharged many patients over the space of an afternoon and operations were cancelled. The local government started contacting business owners informing them if you can’t provide drinking and toilet facilities for staff you would have to close. It reminded me very much of the initial panic in the early days of Covid when we had the infamous toilet roll shortages and food shortages before the virus hit.
This was all caused by lack of preparedness for a disaster scenario by the local authorities and many business had to let down their customers as a result.
Now my business tag line of Oil Analysis Laboratories has “for when failure is not an option” in the name, so letting customers be impacted was simply not on the cards. So myself and my senior management team quickly identified what was needed and got underway with an unlimited budget to ensure customers were not impacted.
Key areas to solve
Staff hydration
Without well hydrated staff we couldn’t operate. I immediately bought in as much bottled water as I could for both work and also for staff to take home to drink between shifts and setup daily deliveries of bottled water even past when the fix was predicted. Why? As I expected the water might not be drinkable (see picture below) for several days after fixing and could not afford to have the workforce all off sick after drinking contaminated water.
Couriers and suppliers
We also identified that without couriers able to deliver we couldn’t receive and then process samples. Hence we checked each of our courier suppliers had enough water for their drivers and depots in the local area. Every courier driver that visited was offered water to take with them. One major courier we found had been given only 24L of water for 150 staff and no portaloos, to which we provided some of our water supply to them to keep them going until further stocks arrived from head office.
Lab operations
Now the lab consumes water as part of its daily operations including deionised, ultra pure and tap water. Many labs have deionised water systems that feed from main water supplies that deionise the water in situ. These are generally great as you never run out, but without tap water they become glorified paperweights on the lab benches. For tasks where deionised and ultra pure water were required we already had plenty supplies to perform the lab task in bottled forms in case of a scenario like this.
However without tap water we needed to source large quantities of deionised water to keep the lab going for what are quite simple tasks such as cleaning glassware or flushing the toilets. Which you will notice from my thumbnail for the article that we sourced multiple 25L drums of deionised water to be able to flush the toilets. Less spend a penny and more spend £5.25 a flush.
Why didn’t you flush the toilets with sea water?
A few customers who had seen the news stories said “you are right by the sea” can’t you use that for things that don’t need clean water like your toilets. Interestingly I’m sure some people did do this during the panic, however, sea water is extremely corrosive to most metallic plumbing parts. Although most the systems have plastic, the water will eventually hit metal pipes and the last thing we wanted to do was cause more problems with further leaks once the systems were re-pressurised. For the chemistry explanation, salt water forms an electrolyte allowing both Galvanic corrosion and increased rates of rusting in systems. Unless the pipework has been designed to handle sea water (which based on the preparedness of the local authorities I doubted) it was best to take a cautious approach. In terms of deionised water although more expensive than bottled water I couldn’t with good conscience use drinking water that could help others during the crisis better. Securing deionised water did not impact the most priority water supplies of drinking water which was fast depleting in the area.
Compounding issues
You could imagine that with the pressure the lab was facing at this point we could have done with a quiet day on samples, but instead we had our busiest ever day with over twice our average number of samples coming in on the Friday. However, because we monitor what customers have pre-registered we knew this glut of samples would be hitting us soon and processed all the samples in the usual turnaround with no delays to customers.
So why have you told me this story?
This may seem a strange oil analysis topic and indeed there are people dealing with millions of times worse predicaments all over the world. For me and I think many in the area it brought to our attention how we assume things such as safe water coming out the taps will always be there. This isn’t always the case. You need to have good planning for the worst case scenarios to mitigate risk. Anyone who has any ISO certifications such as 9001 for their business will know that planning is part of any good risk management strategy. In our scenario we do actually practice what we preach and prepare for numerous potential disaster scenarios, so our lab can deliver throughout. I see every day how potential issues arise and can be avoided in a diverse range of our customers and try avoid these in our own operations. Our cost to our business was on extra water supplies but if compared to the cost of having to shut down the lab for a few days this amount is negligible. However, many businesses didn’t plan and prepare and it caused huge financial consequences for them which will take very long time to recover.
If you think about your own business I am sure there are parts you just assume will be fine or never have problems. But how do you REALLY know? Regular condition monitoring with techniques such as lube oil and fluid analysis help identify problems way in advance of a failure. This means you can plan proactively to fix them to avoid unplanned downtime.
If you are thinking of starting an oil analysis programme then you can’t go wrong by getting in touch with the lab that practices what it preaches for when failure is not an option.