Drinking water, food safety and wastewater compliance for remote camps.

Scope

What we inspect

Drinking water

Drinking water: source, treatment, storage, distribution

Camp water fails differently to town water, and differently again depending on where it comes from. Bore and artesian supplies, surface water, potable water trucked in by tanker, reverse osmosis — each carries its own hazards, and each needs a different approach in the field. We work across all four. The chain is longer than a town’s, and every link in it is owned by someone different.

We build and review drinking water quality management plans for camp supplies, assess them against the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines, and verify that the controls in the plan are the controls actually operating.

• Source — bore, artesian, surface water or tankered supply, including catchment, bore-head and wellhead risks
• Tankered water — carrier hygiene, loading points, chain of custody, and the gap between “potable” on the docket and potable in the tank
• Treatment — disinfection performance, reverse osmosis plant operation, free and total chlorine, contact time, and residual at the far end of the run
• Storage — tank condition, stagnation, temperature and Legionella risk in warm water services
• Distribution — reticulation, dead legs, and what actually comes out of the tap at the far end of the camp
• Field testing on site: pH, turbidity, conductivity, total dissolved solids and chlorine, plus microbiological testing for E. coli, coliforms, enterococci and heterotrophic plate count
• PFAS assessment against the Health Based Guidance Values, where the source or the site history warrants it

All of that sits inside our accredited scope, including the sampling. Legionella pneumophila and Pseudomonas aeruginosa sit in that scope as well — we generally run those through a laboratory rather than at the tap, but the assessment is accredited work either way.

Food safety

Food safety: the kitchen you don’t control

Most camp catering is contracted out. The operator holds the contract; the contractor holds the food safety program; and the risk stays with the operator.

We audit against FSANZ Standards 3.1.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3 and 3.3.1, and AS 4674 for premises design and fit-out — as an independent third party, not as the contractor’s own auditor.

• Independent food safety audits of camp kitchens, messes and crib rooms
• Catering contractor performance against the contract and the food safety program
• Cold chain from delivery to service, including the long inbound leg
• Premises layout, fit-out and equipment
• Food safety program review and uplift, written for a kitchen that cannot get a part delivered same-day
• Verification after an incident, and support through a regulator’s visit

The commercial case is non-productive time. A food-borne outbreak in a village does not cost you a penalty; it costs you a roster.

Wastewater

Sewage treatment and licence conditions

Camps run their own sewage treatment plants under an environmental authority with conditions on effluent quality, monitoring, reporting and irrigation or discharge. Those conditions are enforceable, and someone has to verify they are being met — independently of the operator and the maintenance contractor.

• Onsite performance verification of sewage treatment plant operation against design and licence conditions
• Effluent quality monitoring review, and whether the sampling regime matches what the licence actually requires
• Irrigation and discharge management, including buffer distances and environmental nuisance
• Waste handling and pollution control across the site
• Evidence packs for regulator reporting and for internal assurance

This work sits within our accredited scope for pollution control, waste handling and water handling, with acceptance criteria drawn from the licence itself.

Accreditation

Why accreditation matters more here than almost anywhere

Anyone can write a report. NATA accreditation to ISO/IEC 17020 means a third party has assessed our competence, independence and methods — and continues to. For camp work our scope specifically covers food safety, water quality, communicable diseases, pest management, waste handling and pollution control, with sampling and field testing included.

Which matters because a camp is where the report gets tested. Whether a finding holds up in front of a regulator, an insurer, a client’s assurance team or a court is not a question you want to answer for the first time after an outbreak.

Smale Consulting Group is accredited by NATA for compliance with ISO/IEC 17020 as a Type C inspection body. Our detailed scope is available here. Accreditation No. 20913. That accreditation carries international recognition through the ilac-MRA, now Global ACI, so our reports are recognised across signatory economies. More about our accreditations.

Coverage

Where we work

We work across Queensland’s mining and resources corridors — the Bowen Basin, the north-west minerals province around Mount Isa and Cloncurry, and the Surat and Galilee basins — through New South Wales, and across the Northern Territory, where camp supply chains are longest and the nearest laboratory is furthest away.

• Mining camps and villages, coal and metalliferous, operator-run and contractor-run
• Oil and gas camps across coal seam gas and pipeline construction
• Mobile and modular camps that move with the work, where the compliance chain resets at every mobilisation
• Fixed accommodation villages with permanent infrastructure and long-lived risk

Brisbane-based, mobilising to remote sites as a matter of routine rather than exception.

Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific: where the logistics are the risk

Australian operators run projects across the Asia-Pacific that need Australian-standard environmental health assurance in places with none of the supporting infrastructure. No accredited laboratory within reach. No reliable municipal water. A tropical disease burden — malaria, dengue, typhoid — that changes what a camp’s controls have to achieve. And a supply chain where a sample can take days to reach anywhere it can be analysed.

We have delivered work in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Nauru. Because NATA accreditation is internationally recognised through the ilac-MRA, the same accredited basis applies to that work as to a site in the Bowen Basin.

Understanding how things work matters as much as knowing the standard. Procurement takes longer. Parts do not arrive. Local regulators operate differently and expect to be engaged differently. A control that is entirely reasonable on a Bowen Basin site can be undeliverable on an outer island, and a recommendation that ignores that is one nobody implements. We write findings that can be closed out where the site actually is.

Field capability matters more, not less. When laboratory turnaround is measured in days, on-site testing is often the only result that arrives while it can still change a decision. Our accredited field testing travels with us.

So does the ability to talk to the people who know. Our Director, John Smale, spent several years in Melanesia and speaks Solomon Islands Pijin. In an outbreak investigation or a kitchen audit, the person who can tell you what actually happens at four in the morning is a camp cook or a water operator, not the site manager. Having that conversation directly — without a translator, and without it filtered through a supervisor — is the difference between a plausible finding and a correct one.

Outputs

What you receive

• An inspection report written to be read by a regulator, not filed
• Findings ranked by risk, with what to do and by when
• Sampling and field test results with chain of custody
• Verification of close-out, so a finding is closed on evidence
• Work carried out under our ISO/IEC 17020 scope and identified as such — and where something falls outside it, we say so

FAQ

Common questions

Related

See this work in practice in our case studies, or read more on:

Water Quality →Food Safety →Legionella Risk Management →Infectious Disease Prevention and Control →Accreditations →