Are you taking Legionnaires’ disease seriously enough? The summer 2015 outbreak in New York City that killed 12 people and sickened over 100 more underscores the danger to your building occupants (and your reputation) if Legionella risk isn’t managed carefully.

Because Legionella is a building water problem, health officials agree that managing building water systems properly is the key to prevention. Since last summer’s outbreak, laws were established to require building operators in New York State to create water management plans by March 2016 that include cooling towers.

Take this opportunity to reduce your legal risk, protect your brand and show leadership in corporate responsibility by instituting a water management program informed by ANSI/ASHRAE 188-2015. This regulation-ready standard has broad support for its Legionella prevention approach and complies with Veterans Health Administration and World Health Organization guidelines.

However, ASHRAE 188 only provides a framework and basic requirements – the rest is up to you. Your decisions can impact the success and cost of your water management program for years downstream. Lay a solid foundation for success with these nine tips.

1) Understand Your Portfolio

Which properties should have water management plans (WMPs)? For a multi-building campus, should all the buildings be included or just some of them?

A WMP can cover all the buildings on one site, but not multiple sites. For example, only one WMP is needed for a property with multiple buildings managed by the same personnel even if the buildings are for different uses (e.g., healthcare and office). But three buildings in different locations – even if the buildings are similar in size and configuration and located within a few miles of each other – will require three WMPs, one for each site.

What about leased buildings? Deal with landlords and tenants as necessary to ensure control measures are implemented. You may need to ask (or require) tenants to maintain their plumbing fixtures per your WMP. Otherwise, those areas could not only present a risk to people in the tenant space but also affect Legionella growth in other parts of the plumbing system. If the tenant is responsible for maintaining a cooling tower that could affect people in its building as well as other buildings on the campus, ensure the tenant’s cooling tower maintenance complies with your WMP.

2) Include All At-Risk Water Systems

Standard 188 requires WMPs to account for cooling towers, whirlpool spas, ornamental fountains, water features, misters, air washers and humidifiers. For plumbing systems, however, the standard requires a WMP only if the building has any of the following:

■     A centralized hot water system
■     More than 10 stories
■     Housing designated for people over 65
■     Patients staying longer than 24 hours
■     An area housing or treating people who are immunocompromised or otherwise more susceptible than the general population to Legionella infections.

How you apply the first two factors – centralized hot water systems and the number of stories – is crucial to risk management.

All other factors being equal, a centralized domestic hot water system (for example, ground floor water heaters supplying hot water to faucets with recirculation back to the heaters) is typically more prone to Legionella growth than a system that supplies only cold water to faucets with tankless heaters underneath. But other non-centralized domestic hot water configurations – such as small tank-type water heaters for apartment units or sets of common-area restrooms – may actually be more prone to Legionella growth than a centralized system with recirculation.

It’s also not uncommon to find Legionella in samples collected from domestic cold water systems, especially during the summer when the water may not be all that cold.

Think carefully about the number of stories as well. Larger piping networks are generally more prone to Legionella growth than ones found in single-family homes or small office buildings, but Legionella testing data indicates that you’d be foolish to assume a building is free of Legionella because it has 7 stories instead of 11.

Consistency is key to making good decisions. If you have authority over several buildings and only some of them have an ASHRAE 188 risk factor, be consistent with control measures regardless of your decision about establishing a WMP.

Let’s say you have 20 buildings in your portfolio, 15 of which have either 10-plus stories or a centralized domestic hot water system, and 5 that don’t have any risk factors. If you establish a WMP for the 15 but not for the other 5, you should still implement control measures in the 5 that are consistent with the 15 for like-kind equipment. For example, if the WMPs for the 15 buildings outline control measures for cold water storage tanks, implement those same measures for cold water storage tanks in the other 5. If the WMP for the 15 buildings has flushing procedures for infrequently used faucets, make sure the other 5 buildings use the same. Otherwise, if a case of Legionnaires’ disease occurs, how will you explain why you implemented control measures in buildings 1-15 but not for the same equipment in buildings 16-20? Saying ASHRAE 188 did not require a WMP is not a good enough answer – your program must be defensible.

A smart approach might be to establish comprehensive WMPs for buildings with risk factors and then decide how to keep the other buildings consistent with that plan. For some facilities, it may make sense to establish a full WMP even if ASHRAE 188 does not require it. In others, you might create a simple list of maintenance measures without all the elements of a full-blown WMP such as team meetings and validation.

3) Define the Assessment Scope

A WMP should be established based on types of building water systems rather than on Legionella test results or the condition of equipment. This means that the objective of the assessment is not to assess risk to determine whether a WMP is needed; the point is simply to identify the types of water systems on the site, note key system components and construct diagrams showing how the systems flow to one another. Taking pictures can be helpful to the team but is optional. Testing water systems for Legionella can provide valuable information for validating the effectiveness of a WMP, but is not necessary for the assessment.

Your assessment also doesn’t need to report conditions conducive to Legionella growth or transmission. A comprehensive WMP will include control measures to correct any problems a surveyor would find. That is why the water management plan model provides better risk reduction than periodic expert assessments. Instead of getting a risk assessment report card once a year, the WMP leads the facilities personnel down a path of continuously uncovering and correcting potential problems.

Because the primary objective is to identify water systems rather than assess risk, it is actually more accurate to call it a site survey or water systems survey rather than an assessment.  READ ARTICLE

5. Washington D.C.

Our nation’s capital has the benefit of being located on the East Coast, a prominent gateway into the U.S., but also benefits from infrastructure developments that make it appealing for hotelier investment. An average of 1 million riders per day are expected to travel on the city’s metro line by 2030, prompting the addition of 220 new cars to the system and overall expansion, and with metro lines comes plans to add 87 new hotels to the region as of a pipeline report from Dec. 31, 2015.

“You open up a whole new section of metro and you get a lot of new commercial development,” Ford said. “That’s one of the things driving that market area. The project is still behind, but hotels are banking on it.”

4. Los Angeles

By virtue of being the largest gateway city on the West Coast, it only makes sense that Los Angeles would have a large development pipeline when industry figures are strong. And with occupancy continuing to push the limit of expectations, developers have 96 new projects planned for the city, all of them looking to benefit from the location’s higher rate and demand structures.

“Los Angeles is more attractive to companies and tourism by virtue of it being a gateway city,” Ford said. “It’s considered sexier, higher in demand.”

3. Dallas

The energy sector is in an interesting place today, with oil prices falling and staying down over protracted periods. Despite this, Dallas, one of the biggest players in the energy corridor, continues to build hotels.

“You would have thought that investors would have pulled back in energy corridors, but they really haven’t,” Ford said. “Dallas added 50 projects to its pipeline in the fourth quarter of 2015. As for why, it’s a bit of an enigma.”

Currently, Dallas has 39 hotels under construction, 52 starting construction within 12 months and 30 in early planning stages.

2. Houston

In many cases, Houston and Dallas go hand in hand in terms of hotel investment and the reasons behind their development pipelines. While Dallas has 121 properties in its pipeline, Houston has 167, with 43 under construction, 87 to begin in the next 12 months and 37 in early planning. Like Dallas, from the outside looking in one may expect investors to be backing away from the area but instead they are diving in.

“The numbers don’t indicate a cautious tone, they indicate otherwise,” Ford said. “They go against what you would think would be happening there given the drop in energy prices. What else is keeping that pipeline alive and active is mysterious.”

1. New York

For those of you who crave mystery, New York is not the place. Lodging Econometrics forecasts an 8.5-percent growth rate for rooms in the city for 2016, and an additional 4.8 percent rooms increase the following year. New York has 204 hotels in its pipeline, the result of increases in investment each quarter beginning in 2013. But what makes the market so strong, despite the cost of entry and sky-high competition?

The simple answer is that everyone wants a bite out of the Big Apple, but more realistically it’s that the cost to enter the market requires such a commitment that few are willing to back out of a development even when the market sours. After finding a site, hiring architects, settling on a design and securing entitlements, developers are often knee deep in a project that they want to see to fruition.

“We all experienced a market correction earlier in the year, and I don’t know what the New York numbers will look like come March 31 [the end of the first quarter], but if they go down it won’t be by much,” Ford said. “In the long term, developers know opening a hotel in New York will be good. They may take a cautious approach if things change, but they will continue to invest and get their hotel open.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

Honorable mentions for development markets include Miami, Boston and San Francisco, all of which are smaller cities than the top five but nonetheless are experiencing a burst of new construction. However, Ford also mentioned two markets that were currently experiencing a building boom that may not be sustainable.

Austin, Texas, has a hotel pipeline 74 hotels deep, and Pittsburgh has 60 projects of its own on the way. For Austin, that means 8,740 rooms are opening mostly over a two-year period, increasing the city’s supply by as much as 25 percent.

“This is a pretty significant increase for these cities,” Ford said. “It’s a high-tech area and a state capital with a state institution in the University of Texas and is known for its music. Whether that warrants this type of construction is unknown.”

Ford clarified that a large number of these hotels are opening in Austin’s suburbs, ensuring not all of the openings will take place in the city’s downtown, but insisted that it is still a fair supply addition for a location such as this. Pittsburgh is in much the same situation as Austin, with Ford unsure of its ability to sustain the 60 hotels planned for it.

“If it’s growing to match this type of development, it isn’t making the news cycle,” Ford said. READ ARTICLE

Figuring out how to attract millennials, or those ages 18-34, to facilities management careers is vital to securing the growth of the industry. A Pew Research Center study found that more than 1 in 3 workers in the U.S. today are millennials, and that this year they overtook Generation X to become the largest share of the workforce.

The cliff might look steep now, but just across the chasm is a more viable, tech-savvy and environmentally friendly future for facilities management.

Increasing industry awareness

For more millennials to join the workforce, they have to be aware of the dynamic career paths facilities management offers. In a JLL survey of more than 200 college students conducted last year, 43 percent of students knew of facilities management as an industry, and only 1 percent of students thought they would choose a career in the field. In addition, almost half of the students surveyed were seeking degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics-related fields, essential study areas for careers in facilities management. There’s a growing pool of STEM students nationwide, too: A National Student Clearinghouse report found that 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees achieved by men and 29 percent achieved by women are in STEM fields. With the right attitude and the right skills, these graduates can become valuable leaders in the facilities management industry.

Millennial strengths

It’s important for facilities management professionals to recognize the unique talents that millennials can bring to positions in the industry. One significant strength is their familiarity with technology. Millennials have grown up using complex, ever-changing technology, and, according to a PwC study, they are the first generation to go into the workplace with astronger understanding of essential business software and tools than most senior workers. They’re also eager to learn new systems, and are2.5 times more likely than older workers to be early adopters of new technology, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

A second strength is their eco-consciousness. A study by GPI found that millennials are more concerned about the environment than any other age group, and that more than 80 percent of them believe being eco-conscious improves their quality of life. Many millennials are well-versed in issues of sustainability, especially as it relates to workplace environments and apartment buildings and alternative energy sources.

Together, these strengths will benefit the facilities management industry by helping it adapt to the changing needs of society and daily life. By recognizing these strengths and developing them further through training programs, the facilities management industry will evolve.

Responding to millennial work preferences

Millennials have workplace and lifestyle preferences that set them apart from previous generations. They seek out positions that have opportunities for advancement, mentorship and personal growth, according to FacilitiesNet. They also want to understand ahead of time, as much as possible, the exact tasks and duties that will be expected of them, and prefer jobs that have wellness and personal benefits, like gym facilities or child care. Facilities management professionals that recognize and respond to these preferences will attract greater numbers of young talent and ensure their buildings see a bright and relevant future.

Training programs

Apprenticeships and training programs are great ways attract millennials to facilities management careers and prepare them for the realities and responsibilities of the job.

“It is very important for young people to meet face-to-face with people who are currently working in the FM and property sectors,” said Gillian Burdis, CSR manager at BT in an interview with FMLink. “This enables both parties to share experiences and perceptions and gives young people an opportunity to see the potential of a career in the property industry, working with people not so far removed from themselves.”

Training programs allow young people to learn directly from the professionals they’ll be working with, and, eventually, replacing.

When choosing a career path, millennials look to see how they’ll be able to make the world a better place. A career in facilities management is well-suited to this ideals, as it is dedicated to maintaining and improving the spaces in which we live, work and grow. With their technological and environmental savvy, millennials are vital to the facilities management industry. To bridge that age gap, facilities management professionals should investigate how their workplaces can appeal to millennials preferences and provide extensive training opportunities.  READ MORE

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