The Association for Facilities Engineering (AFE) Foundation honored two outstanding facilities engineering projects with its FAME Awards, presented last month at Facilities America 2002 in New Orleans. Water treatment development Geisinger Health System's facilities operations group, Danville, PA, was presented the FAME Award of Excellence for developing a first-ever treatment process to elimin...
The Association for Facilities Engineering (AFE) Foundation honored two outstanding facilities engineering projects with its FAME Awards, presented last month at Facilities America 2002 in New Orleans.
Water treatment development
Geisinger Health System’s facilities operations group, Danville, PA, was presented the FAME Award of Excellence for developing a first-ever treatment process to eliminate legionella bacteria from its domestic water supply. The system serves a large medical center on a 460-acre campus with 2 million sq ft of buildings.
Legionella is the cause of Legionnaires disease, a type of pneumonia that is fatal if not diagnosed and treated early. People with compromised immunological and respiratory systems may contract the disease by inhaling aerosolized water droplets containing the organism. Statistics show that 50% of healthcare facilities harbor the dangerous legionella organism in their domestic water supplies.
The water treatment developed by Geisinger’s facilities operations group used a multidisciplinary approach to become the first successful system implemented in the U.S. Key was the introduction of chlorine dioxide (ClO 2 ) into the 550,000-gal reservoir that serves the entire campus. Other actions included the elimination of dead legs in the piping and the replacement of their 15-yr-old cooling towers with 5-deg approach, counterflow towers with no sumps.
Risk assessment
The FAME Award of Merit was presented to the Atmel Corp. site facilities department, Colorado Springs, CO, for its work in developing a facilities systems risk assessment program. The two Atmel semiconductor production plants in Colorado Springs operate 24 hr/day, 7 days/wk.
The site facilities organization was challenged with meeting uptime goals as their plants aged while operating in a resource-constrained environment. A team of engineers and technicians from facilities, operations, and maintenance defined seven factors that contributed to or helped eliminate risk and developed a database to capture all risk assessment data down to the equipment level.
The Atmel assessment system has enabled the development of a comprehensive, prioritized roadmap for reducing system risk and supports capital resource budgeting with an easily understandable quantification of risk.
