The managing director of SMAS, Leandro Sousa, told Lusa news agency that the “costs related to the structure of the Quality Control Laboratory are in the order of 762 thousand euros per year and include maintenance costs for the building, equipment, consumables, material and personnel”.

According to the person in charge, this is a “clear commitment to the quality of water and public health required in an accredited laboratory”.

Located in São Romão, in the municipality of Leiria, the Quality Control Laboratory is an autonomous entity within SMAS, its main client.

There are 400 collection points for collecting water samples, captured and distributed, along the 1,840 kilometers of the network in the municipality of Leiria.

“It is the largest network in terms of extension, next to Sintra”, revealed Leandro Sousa.

Tests are carried out daily on a number of pesticides, water pH, material microbiology and a defined list of microorganisms.

Every year, three thousand containers enter the laboratory's various state-of-the-art equipment, where 11 laboratory technicians collaborate in the analysis of thousands of parameters per year, just in water for human consumption.

“Non-compliance is around 0.2%”, assured Leandro Sousa, who highlighted that the “preventive and invisible work in terms of cleaning the reservoirs”, carried out upstream, will be reflected in the good water results.

Each year, an operational plan is defined and the team strictly follows it: “New parameters and methodologies are defined every year. For example, pesticide levels vary from year to year. The water that reaches the taps is a highly verified and highly reliable product.”

24-hour monitoring can detect any abnormality, as happened around 20 years ago, when an area of ​​the city of Leiria was left without water supply because it was contamination by ammoniacal nitrogen.

The laboratory includes several spaces. In the area of ​​microbiology, it is clear that everything is washable, disinfected and there is excellent control of temperature, humidity and pressure. The samples that arrive in the room are processed using different methodologies depending on what will be analysed.

There are incubation and refrigeration greenhouses, among other materials, in duplicate, to ensure that everything runs smoothly, in case of a breakdown, explained Antonio Martins, technician responsible for microbiology, who said that the laboratory is also equipped with biological security cameras and test cultures, where a positive is introduced to verify and test that the equipment has the capacity to read it.

In the physical chemistry laboratory, a number of compounds are analysed “such as nitrates, nitrites, pH and all traditional chemistry”, Gloria Pedrosa, technical manager of Physical Chemistry, told Lusa.

In the short term, Leandro Sousa also revealed that an investment of 400 thousand euros is planned for the rehabilitation of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system and around one million euros for the installation of photovoltaic panels, “as the cost of energy is significant”.