Drinking Water (20 page)

By the time lab results came back a few days later showing no contamination in the water, the mystery had been solved. Two fifteen-year-old high school kids, looking for excitement, had apparently caused all the mayhem so they could pee into the water tower. The
Boston Herald
newspaper humorously called them the “Whiz Kids.” But it was no laughing matter. Their teenage stunt had cost the town $40,000 in response costs and, most important, starkly revealed what municipal water managers have long known. Our drinking water supplies are vulnerable.

As Ralph Mullinix, water manager for Loveland, Colorado, put it, “It’s not that difficult to get up on top of a water tower. Every high school kid in the country has done that during his senior year, usually to write his girlfriend’s name on it. You can harden your perimeter around your key facilities, but the fact is that water systems are very vulnerable.” Elizabeth Hunt, Vermont’s drinking water chief of planning, adds more darkly, “After 9/11, we can’t just assume that it’s only some kids goofing off.”

The previous two chapters explored whether it is safe to drink the water, focusing on natural and emerging threats such as sewage and synthetic hormones. But
intentional
threats to drinking water can pose just as great a danger. The Blackstone incident showed just how easy it is to contaminate water supplies on purpose. Fortunately, no one was harmed by the high school prank, but what if the Blackstone intruders had been terrorists intent on causing real injury, not just thrill-seeking juvenile delinquents? Standing on top of the water tower, the fiberglass cover pried off, could they really have poisoned the whole town? Just how vulnerable are our drinking water sources? And what should we be doing in the face of these potential threats?

While the attacks of 9/11 focused immediate attention on the safety of our drinking water, these are hardly new concerns. Poisoning the enemy’s water is a longstanding military strategy. When Solon of Athens laid siege to Cirrha in 600 BC, he ordered
that the poisonous hellebore roots be placed in the local water supply, making the Cirrhaeans violently sick. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces were accused of dumping diseased animal carcasses in drinking wells and ponds. Japan allegedly introduced cholera strains into drinking water during its conquest of China. Poisoning has served its political purposes as well. The Roman emperor Nero routinely dispatched his enemies by pouring cherry laurel water, which naturally contains cyanide, into their wells.

In 1941, concerned over domestic attacks from Nazi or Japanese agents, J. Edgar Hoover, the famed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote, “It has long been recognized that among public utilities, water supply facilities offer a particularly vulnerable point of attack to the foreign agent, due to the strategic position they occupy in keeping the wheels of industry turning and in preserving the health and morale of the American populace.” And he was right. Since his warning, there has been a series of attempted attacks on American drinking water supplies.

In the early 1970s, the domestic revolutionary group the Weather Underground sought to blackmail a homosexual officer working at the bacteriological warfare facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the hopes of obtaining microorganisms to contaminate water supplies. A decade later, the FBI foiled a plot by the white supremacist group “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord” to poison urban water supplies with potassium cyanide. In 2002, four Moroccans were caught planning a tunnel under the U.S. embassy in Rome so they could contaminate the water with ten pounds of potassium ferrocyanide. In his State of the Union address that same year, President Bush stated that soldiers in Afghanistan had found diagrams and information on U.S. water facilities.

These are just a few of the most publicized incidents, but there are countless more. An editorial in the
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
put this in broader context, claiming that “threats to attack, or, more commonly, contaminate, water systems are not unusual. There are hundreds of threats against municipal
water systems each year.” A classified 2012 U.S. intelligence assessment leaked to the
Washington Post
concluded that water infrastructure could become a high-visibility structure for terrorists to attack, particularly as water problems become more acute across the globe.

Even popular culture has picked up on the threat. The 2002 action movie
The Tuxedo
features Jackie Chan chopping and kicking his way to thwart the evil designs of a bottled water manufacturer trying to poison municipal water supplies (all the better to grow his market share). The plot of the 2005 movie
Batman Begins
turns on a secretive and ancient group attacking Gotham City by injecting fear-inducing compounds into the water system. The 2006 film
V for Vendetta
features corrupt government leaders contaminating London’s water supply to kill, spread fear, and consolidate power.

To date, large-scale attacks have fortunately been limited to the big screen in movie theaters. There have not been any successful, major attacks on American water supplies, but the threat and fear remain. And for good reason. The simple fact is that our water supplies cannot be fully protected. We can erect more fences, higher fences, locks, and security cameras, and hire more guards—and we have—but these will never make us completely safe. To understand why, you need to appreciate the sheer size of a municipal water system.

Most water systems are linear designs, from source to faucet. They start at a supply source, typically some combination of a reservoir, dam, river, or groundwater aquifer. The water is then moved to a treatment facility. Depending on the quality of the water, the treatment plant may use mechanical and chemical processes for purification. These can range from settling pools and fine filters to adding chlorine, bubbling ozone gas, or passing the water through ultraviolet light. The drinking-quality water is then passed through distribution systems to a faucet and the point of consumption. Depending on the setting, distribution systems can include water towers, pipes, and pumping stations.

The architecture of a modern water system

So why is protection so difficult? Consider that, nationwide, water is drawn from more than 75,000 dams and reservoirs. This water courses through two million miles of pipe, with millions more access points. There are more than 160,000 drinking water facilities, mostly owned and operated by local government and private parties. Some of these utilities are huge, delivering water to major cities. Others are tiny, serving communities of just twenty-five people. When you add up all the reservoirs, dams, wells, pumping stations, water towers, water tanks, and water treatment facilities, not to mention the miles of pipes connecting them all, it becomes evident pretty quickly that the different parts of our water systems present a big—an impossibly big—target to protect.

Moreover, most of the water sources and distribution system are easily accessible to the public, or at least accessible without much trouble. The Blackstone teenage vandals were hardly master criminals, and they did just fine. There have been similar reports of teen damage in Florida, Washington, and Vermont, just to name
a few. In facing the challenge from determined terrorists, it seems clear that we have to further “harden” our water infrastructure against threats but, in a world of limited budgets, which parts of the system should be hardened? To answer this intelligently, we need to better understand the nature of the threats.

B
ATMAN
B
EGINS
AND OTHER POPULAR VERSIONS OF WATER ATTACKS
often portray the evildoers skulking in shadows of a huge, churning treatment plant, pulling out a test tube or flask, and pouring the nefarious contents into the water. But what would an attack look like in real life? Leaving aside the super-fear-inducing toxin of the movies, there are basically four types of threats water managers are genuinely concerned about.

The most obvious is chemical. We all know arsenic in a glass of water can kill, and there are plenty of historical examples to persuade those who remain in doubt. Nor is arsenic alone as a dangerous powder that can be slipped into the drink of an unsuspecting victim. So-called “date rape” drugs rely on spiking a drink with sedatives that impair motor control and can cause amnesia. Other threats may be posed by a whole slew of water-soluble chemicals, including cyanide or even a “designer chemical” specially designed for the task.

The second class of threat is biological. In some respects, this is an ever-present concern because every year we find unanticipated contamination of drinking water by microbes. The 103 deaths in Milwaukee described earlier were caused by the presence of the cryptosporidium bacteria in the drinking water. The small town of Gideon, in southwest Missouri, was hit by an epidemic that afflicted almost half of the population. Fifteen people were admitted to hospital, and seven residents in a nursing home died. The cause was eventually attributed to salmonella spread by bird droppings in the town’s water tank. Either the treatment plant’s chlorination of the water was inadequate, or these were bacterial strains resistant to chlorine.

These examples were unintended biological contaminants. The government is also concerned about the intentional introduction
of these organisms. The U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command carried out a study of potential biological weapons. In all, twenty-seven biological agents were examined. Seven of these were identified as “weaponized”—able to be used as a weapon in a drinking water system—and a further fourteen were assessed as possible or probable weapons. This does not include, of course, bio-engineered agents.

Increasing attention has recently been focused on the third threat, cyber attacks. Computers play a critical role in operating water systems. Known generally as SCADA systems (for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), these computer programs monitor, control, and, when necessary, intervene to ensure proper operation of a water system. A hacker with evil intent could potentially take over the system and release toxic levels of water treatment chemicals prior to distribution or, alternatively, not release the required water treatment chemicals.

A related scenario might involve, for example, a terrorist hacking into the water system’s computers and manipulating valves and gates to drain a reservoir or manipulate flow pressures to burst pipes (a so-called water hammer). This would mimic the urban myth surrounding water pipes and popular television shows. Every year, around the time of the Super Bowl, there are occasional newspaper warnings that TV viewers running to the toilet at halftime and collectively flushing at the same time will cause a surge and burst pipes. Years ago, in fact, Harvey Schultz, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, actually issued a “bowl warning” encouraging football viewers to alternate their trips to the bathroom. His warning presumably was tongue-in-cheek, but there have been legends of surges as a result of collective flushes—after the final episode of the series
M*A*S*H
, in 1983, for example. Apparently people stayed riveted to the show for the full two and a half hours and then all sprinted to relieve themselves in a giant synchronized water ballet.

Apart from poisoning and the unlikely possibility of massively simultaneous toilet flushing, the fourth and most obvious threat to water systems comes from conventional explosives. As described
above, most water systems are linear. Blowing up one part of the chain, whether treatment plant, pumps, or pipes, can effectively disable the entire system, making the water undrinkable for perhaps a very long period of time. We have often seen the natural equivalent of this after natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Many treatment plants store large quantities of chlorine, which is a dangerous poison when inhaled, so attacks on treatment plants would also pose a chemical threat to neighbors. And, of course, water systems use a lot of energy, so blowing up the electric grid can wreak havoc.

This chapter is not intended to provide an instructional guide for would-be terrorists on how to poison water supplies. All of the threats outlined above have been described in great detail in the public literature. The key question is whether these potential threats warrant serious attention.
Batman Begins
is just a movie, after all. In real life, which of these threats really are serious?

For starters, it would be a mistake to assume that our water systems present completely soft targets for poisoning. Quite the contrary. Water systems are designed specifically to
prevent
contamination. That’s why we have them in the first place. Water managers deal every day with real attacks to our water quality by bacteria, protozoa, algae, and biofilms. We have become very good at eliminating biological pathogens. Chlorination, ozonation, ultraviolet radiation, and filtration are standard lines of defense, and redundancy is built into the system. If one type of treatment does not destroy the threat, the next one should. Reservoirs are often fenced to keep out wildlife and their excrement. Wachusett Reservoir, one of Boston’s primary water sources, has even spread netting over the surface, floated “scare eye” balloons, and used remote-controlled loud noises to prevent birds from settling in the pond and defecating. The question is how well our safeguards work when the evildoers are human and bent on a harmful purpose rather than birds and deer just doing their business.