GEORGE TOWN – The Sg Dua water treatment plant’s central laboratory has won Institut Kimia Malaysia’s (IKM) Excellence Award for the fifth consecutive year.
Penang Water Supply Corporation (PBAPP) CEO Datuk Jaseni Maidinsa said the award is an acknowledgement of the laboratory’s accomplishments in the field of water testing (raw water, settled water and treated water) in 2021.
He said, in most cases, the results indicated that Penang’s treated water exceeded the requirements of the Quality Assurance Programme’s (QAP) safety parameters.
“In this context, our water supply may be regarded to be among the cleanest, safest and healthiest in Malaysia, even during a difficult year.
“PBAPP had also previously received the awards in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. It should be noted that 2021 recipients of the IKM Excellence Award must comply with the MS ISO/IEC 17025:2017 standard set for testing and calibration laboratories.
The scope of the PBAPP central lab’s accreditation to this ISO standard encompasses 32 parameters, including advanced parameters, such as true colour, conductivity, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen content, biochemical oxygen demand, total suspended solids and total organic carbon,” he said in a statement today.
PBAPP received the award from the IKM director-general Datuk Mohamed Zaini Abdul Rahman in an event at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel here yesterday.
Jaseni said the laboratory is equipped with high-tech equipment including an inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICPOES) and an ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectrophotometer.
“A total organic carbon analyser test results for Penang treated water in 2020, during the national Covid-19 movement control orders, majority of 1.776 million people in Penang depended on treated water supply from PBAPP to their homes for drinking, cooking, washing, cleaning and bathing.
“Although 2020 was a pandemic year, the Penang State Health Department and PBAPP continued to implement a joint water sampling and testing programme and the objective was to ascertain that the quality of Penang treated water complied with the public safety parameters set by the Health Ministry in its Quality Assurance Programme.
“In total, 3,111 samples of treated water were collected and tested in 2020. These samples were taken from Penang’s water treatment plants (on a weekly basis) and at sampling points along the existing water supply pipeline network (on a monthly basis).”
The test results for the 3,111 samples showed that Penang’s treated water complied with the ministry’s QAP.
Key test parameters include turbidity, free residual chlorine, e-coli bacteria, e.coli + free residual chlorine and aluminium. – The Vibes, December 4, 2021
