Risk assessment in which every number has a source

The law says what, but not how

The act requires the assessment to rest on standards, but imposes no scale. Of the seven jurisdictions reviewed, no two score risk the same way. WSP ships ready methodologies with a note on when to use which.

A spreadsheet will not answer the authority

Where did the number come from, when was the source read, and who signed it off? In WSP every P and C score records its rationale, every register item its read date, and every approved document a SHA-256 digest.

The data exists, just in five places

Well records, permits, test results, protection zones and public registers. Once an assessment is opened, the system assembles everything that can be derived and names what cannot.

Intake catchment

Supply system

Internal plumbing

The phrase "water safety plan" does not appear in the act

The act requires risk assessments. WSP is how we organise everything that leads to them and follows from them: the assessments, analyses under art. 133 of the Water Law, protection zones, the monitoring programme and incidents. The authority receives an assessment with a summary report, not a plan.

The authority receives the assessment, it does not approve it

There is no approval procedure and no procedure for agreeing a methodology. RZGW and the Sanitary Inspectorate act on the basis of the assessment: towards polluters, when consenting to less frequent testing, and for additional testing. The art. 133 Water Law intake risk analysis is a separate instrument that the assessment must take into account.

Try it: P = 2, C = 16 gives 32 and a HIGH level. A control measure with validation at E = 4 brings the result down to 8, a MEDIUM level. A documented review of the measure (E = 12) lowers it three times further than a measure that merely works.

The methodology is data, not code

ASTEE, WHO, DVGW W 1004 and the art. 133 model are dictionary rows. An approved methodology cannot be edited, and every item holds a frozen copy of it. If a regulation arrives with its own scoring, it becomes one more row.

Two axes of consequence

Water quality and continuity of supply: from no impact to an outage longer than 48 hours. The engine takes the worse of the two, so a failure that poisons nobody but cuts off a district for three days also carries weight.

Hydrogeology nobody else computes

The overburden protection class from the lithological profile (Hölting, NRW 2008 variant). None of the state or commercial tools reviewed computes this step. A person enters the layer profile, and the calculation is stored with the item as evidence.

Catchment

A description of the intake, the catchment, the hydrogeology and land use.

Hazards

Sources, hazards and hazardous events, placed on the map.

Risk

P × C scoring, the cascade and the levels. The act merges this point with hazard identification.

Measures

Control measures with effectiveness validation, a responsible person and a deadline.

Monitoring programme

Operational and compliance monitoring, with a justification for every item.

Data readiness gate

The workshop opens only once the materials checklist is closed. Every point is present, deliberately skipped with a reason, or missing, with a place to fill it in.

Validator: 16 rules

Each one sourced from the WHO QA Tool, the LAWA checklists or the Finnish model. Missing rationale for P or C, or a significant risk with no action and deadline, blocks approval.

Four eyes and a verifiable signature

Approval comes from a second administrator in your organisation, other than the author. The system records who, when, and the SHA-256 digest of the approved document.

A link for the authority instead of an email

The authority reads the assessment without creating an account, through a link valid for 1 to 90 days. Every visit is logged, and the digest for verification sits next to the signature.

Supervision after filing

An incident creates a review at the same moment, with a 30-day deadline. Statutory deadlines, revalidations and overdue monitoring raise reminders on their own, starting 365 days ahead.

Registers you already keep

Well records, pumping tests, water permits, zone decisions and five years of quality history per parameter. This is where we have an edge: a tool without access to operations starts from a blank page.

12 pressure layers

SEVESO and E-PRTR (Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection), BDOT10k (Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography), MIDAS mining areas and deposits, CLC 2018, PSH abstractions and boreholes from the HYDRO Bank. Sector rules turn them into scored candidate items for the assessment.

3 point lookups

ISOK flood hazard maps, the groundwater body and nature protection forms from the General Directorate for Environmental Protection. The result belongs to the intake, and the assessment carries a copy with its read date, so the document can be reproduced.

Those accountable for water quality

Process engineers and intake managers who run the assessment: they identify hazards, score risk and describe control measures using data from their own operations.

Technical management

The approver, who needs confidence that they are signing complete, validated work, and who sees the deadlines for every layer in one calendar.

The utility's board

Accountable to RZGW and the Sanitary Inspectorate. They receive a document that answers the authority's question of where the number came from, plus a record of who read it and when.

"There is no regulation, so we will wait"

No methodology is not the same as no obligation. The 31 December 2026 deadline does not depend on guidance, and waiting only shortens the time left for the work. If a regulation imposes its own scoring, for us that is a new methodology, and an assessment made today keeps the one it used.

"We will do it ourselves in Excel"

You can, right up to the authority's question of where the number came from, when the source was read and who signed it. A spreadsheet will not freeze the methodology, will not force a rationale and will not give a verifiable signature. And the cycle is three layers times the number of objects, every six years.

"We already have a WSP from 2016"

An excellent starting point for the catchment description and the hazard catalogue. But it was written to WHO edition 1, before the current act: without the three layers, the anchors to art. 4f, 4g and 4i, or scoring that can be reproduced.

"Will you do it for us?"

No. The act says the assessment is made by the water supplier, and the supplier is accountable for it. We provide the tool, the data, the methodology and the validator, and we take configuration and training on ourselves.

We start with one intake

In the call we check how much of the first stage will assemble itself at your utility, and what is missing before the 31 December 2026 deadline. We run the pilot on one intake and the catchment layer.