Last week a small but serious accident happened at one of the major furniture store outlets. A failure of the customer’s toilet has resulted into flooding of children soft play area with sewage water. The store has reacted promptly and closed and stripped the whole area to structural brickwork. The whole area has been cleaned by professional cleaning company who were appointed to perform a deep clean. I have been invited after the deep clean to investigate the area and perform sampling for faeces related bacteria to certify the area as clean.
I have decided to use E. Coli and faecal Enterococci as suitable markers to assess the contamination of the area and collected close to twenty samples from this relatively small area from top to bottom of the room.
Not so good Deep Clean
The initial inspection went relatively smoothly but I must say the term Deep Clean means something entirely different to different people. As is it is understood in my line of work it involves deep clean off all areas, no matter how difficult to access, so no visible debris, dust or any other contamination can be observed. The professional cleaning company was not as understanding in the definition of the deep clean as I would like to. Fortunately the slightly unsatisfactory clean had no effect on overall cleanness of the place which proved to be E.coli and faecal enterococci free and safe to use. The company involved has decided to use 9 cleaning operatives working in an area of no more than 40m2, with no items in it. It may have looked impressive to the stores managers but from my point of view it was seriously over the top and was most likely the cause of incomplete clean. Sometimes just too many people in the area cause more harm than good.
When performing deep clean verification of previously contaminated areas it is important that the analyst has clear perspective of and how had happened and the nature of the contaminant. He must then choose the most suitable market to assess the contamination and have fool proof procedures in place to handle the sampling, transportation and analysis of samples.
By Tomas Gabor
