Backflow water-line attack feared

WSJ via MSNBC | December27,2001 | Yochi J. Dreazen

[John W]

Dec. 27 — In St. Petersburg, Fla., water authorities are keeping a closer eye on system-wide water pressure. In Cleveland, officials are weighing whether to add more chlorine to their water so larger amounts of the chemical will linger in their pipes. In Portland, Ore., alarms are now triggered by smaller drops in water pressure than in the past.

Across the country, water utility officials are taking steps to prevent terrorists from reversing the flow of water into a home or business — which can be accomplished with a vacuum cleaner or bicycle pump — and using the resulting “backflow” to push poisons into a local water-distribution system. Such an attack would use utility pipes for the opposite of their intended purpose: Instead of carrying water out of a tap, the pipes would spread toxins to nearby homes or businesses.

Water utility officials say the backflow threat dominates their post-Sept. 11 discussions with law-enforcement personnel. Although utilities have posted extra guards to patrol reservoirs and treatment plants, officials say the biggest threat to the nation’s water supply may be from the pipes that carry the water, not facilities that store or purify it.

“There’s no question that the distribution system is the most vulnerable spot we have,” says John Sullivan, chief engineer for the Boston Water & Sewer Commission and president of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies. “Our reservoirs are really well protected. Our water-treatment plants can be surrounded by cops and guards. But if there’s an intentional attempt to create a backflow, there’s no way to totally prevent it.” Most reservoirs hold between three million and 30 million gallons of water, which would dilute any poison so significantly that terrorists would have to release enormous quantities to do serious damage. And most poison would be destroyed when the water was purified at a treatment plant. A backflow attack, by contrast, could spread highly concentrated amounts of poison to a few thousand homes or businesses, making the toxin far more effective.

So far, the only backflow incidents on record have been accidental. Four years ago, dozens of gallons of fire-fighting foam backed up through the hoses of firefighters in Charlotte, N.C., and made its way into the city’s water system, prompting officials to order thousands of residents not to shower or drink tap water for several days. In 1998, workers at a United Technologies Corp. Sikorsky helicopter plant in Bridgeport, Conn., added chemicals to the facility’s fire prevention system to guard against corrosion. Some of the chemicals backed into the town’s water system, deluging area homes with contaminated water that residents were told not to drink or use for washing or bathing.

There were no serious injuries in either case, but the incidents rattled many water officials. Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, fears of an accidental backflow incident led to the creation of a group called the American Backflow Prevention Association (www.abpa.org), which works with lawmakers, water officials and engineers across the country. The group publishes a newsletter and an educational comic book for children that features a character named Buster Backflow.

The federal government devotes little money to protecting the nation's water supply system, which many law enforcement officials see as a potential terrorist target.

Still, experts have long feared that a terrorist would try an intentional attack. As Gay Porter DeNileon — a journalist who serves on the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Advisory Group, a water-industry organization — put it in the May issue of the journal of the American Water Works Association, “One sociopath who understands hydraulics and has access to a drum of toxic chemicals could inflict serious damage pretty quickly.”

Utility officials say that it is difficult to fully prevent a backflow incident, but they are hopeful that they can limit the damage through early detection. The beginning of a backflow attack probably would be marked by a sudden drop in water pressure in a targeted neighborhood as terrorists stopped the flow of water into a home or business. The pressure would then climb as attackers reversed the flow of water and began using it to carry poison.

Utilities regularly monitor system-wide water pressure, because a sharp and unanticipated decrease — at times other than, say, halftime of the Super Bowl, when tens of millions of American toilets flush — can indicate that a pipe has burst. Most utilities monitor pressure at water-treatment plants and inside the underground pipes that carry the water to nearby homes and businesses; some use advanced telemetric sensors inside pipes. In recent weeks, many utilities say they have increased the frequency of their checks. “A small drop-off would attract attention it wouldn’t have even a short time ago,” says Michelle Clements, a spokeswoman for Oregon’s Portland Water District, which serves 190,000 customers. But officials concede that it might be difficult for them to actually spot the minor drop in pressure that could be the start of a backflow attack. Jeffrey Danneels, who specializes in infrastructure security at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, says that water officials might have a hard time detecting a backflow attack originating in a single home or apartment building. “The smaller the pipe, the harder it would be to notice,” he says.

Another way to protect the public is to increase the amounts of chlorine or other chemicals added to water so that more of the chemical will remain in the pipes, providing residual protection against some toxins, according to Tom Curtis, deputy director of the American Water Works Association, which represents 4,300 public and private water utilities.

At the Cleveland Division of Water, officials are considering adding more chlorine in areas where residual levels are low, says Julius Ciaccia Jr., Cleveland’s water commissioner. Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, some utilities had begun replacing the chlorine with chloramine, a related substance made from the combination of chlorine and ammonia that is believed to linger in pipes longer. Increasing the chemicals has drawbacks, however. “You can only go so far before people begin to complain about the taste,” says Curtis.

The only sure way of preventing a backflow attack, water officials says, is installing valves to prevent water from flowing back into the pipes. Many homes have such valves on toilets and boilers. But virtually none have them on sinks, in part because water officials long assumed that the biggest threat they faced was natural, such as an earthquake, flood or hurricane carrying debris into a reservoir or pipe. Water officials say retrofitting existing structures with the valves would be prohibitively expensive. “We’re used to natural incidents. We’re ready for them,” says Sullivan of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies. “But we’ve never really looked at what could happen if someone really wanted to come and get us. And that’s a hard adjustment to make.”

[Freebird Forever]

Lysergic acid diethylamide would render an entire city insane

I think that this can be mitigated by having all the local radio stations play Grateful Dead bootlegs for 24 hours after the initial exposure.

[Sabertooth]

"Plutonium is heavy, and if tossed into a body of water, would sink to the bottom and into the mud, where it would remain forever, doing absolutely nothing to anybody.

Don't believe me? Then try your own experiment. Toss a chemically-similar metal, "a few grams of lead" [a shotgun pellet would do] into a lake, and let me know when folks start showing symptoms of lead poisoning. "

The plutonium scenario was described to me by a friend of mine who's a physicist. There may be more details that I'm not aware of.

As for chemically similar metals, silver and gold are chemically similar, but not similarly reactive, no?

I'm not a chemist, so I don't know, but are lead and radioactive plutonium going to react the same way when immersed in water?

Silver and Gold don't. Mercury is a neighbor in the periodic table, and it will react even more differently.

[Sabertooth]

Beaver, deer and a lot of other animals naturally carry this parasite. I always found it funny that environmentalists absolutely cannot comprehend this and invariably refer to streams containing Giardia cysts as "polluted."

So can fish.

Even (very rarely) in aquariums.

[Don Joe]

"What's the difference between a 'backflow preventer' and a check valve?"

All of the "backflow preventers" I've seen have been vacuum breakers, required to prevent chemicals from being sucked into the supply lines if the water pressure fails, which would create a siphon effect. A vacuum breaker will open up when pressure drops, letting air be sucked into the system instead of chemicals. (You see these things on darkroom sinks, they look like a flat-bell-kinda thing at the top of a pipe.)

A check valve, on the other hand, is a one-way valve, i.e., a spring-loaded ball. Water can go one way because it pushes the ball into the spring, away from the valve seat. It can't go the other way, because it pushes the ball into the valve seat.

"Also, how would you prevent terrorists from disabling them?"

With the former, you don't. With the latter, you bury them outside the building, between the water mains and the distribution pipe to the building.

IMO the article paints an overly optimistic picture of the threat. What? Yeah, overly optimistic.

That stuff about "a sudden drop in water pressure in a targeted neighborhood as terrorists stopped the flow of water into a home or business" is IMO feel-good nonsense. If the bad guys hooked up a high pressure pump to a water faucet, opened the faucet, and started the pump injecting concentrated toxin into the pipes at a low rate of volume, I dunno, off the top of my head, a gallon or two a minute, they'd be able to effect a considerable amount of havoc with zero detectibility. I mean, hell, there'd be less pressure change from that than there'd be from someone turning on (or off) the faucet to wash his hands.

And where they got that stuff about a vacuum cleaner, I have no idea.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that our infrastructure -- from top to bottom -- was not designed for survivability in hell. It was designed to perform OK in a normal country, populated with normal people. You don't put a half-million dollars worth of bomb and radiation hardening around a ramshackle outhouse in the backyard. You put a hook-latch on the wooden door. IOW, you build the "security" measures to be commensurate with the anticipated level of threat.

We're facing the kind of nightmare that can only occur when a free society is attacked by a group of sociopaths. And the solution is to either retrofit an ever-increasing amount of safety measures (i.e., checkvalves on every supply line to every house and business in the country -- and mind you, that will only address the "poison into the pipes" problem, all other weak points will remain unprotected), or, to deal with the perpetrators of the crimes, and deal with them quickly, and mercilessly.

It's either that, or we let them win.

[Don Joe]

"Lysergic acid diethylamide would render an entire city insane"

Why bother, when democrat politics, welfare state economics, and garden variety television will do the job so much more effectively? LSD wears off after a few hours, but The Great Society's effects are forever. (Or damned close to it.)

[PA Engineer]

Seems to me installing check vavles at the mains going into buildings and residences would make this type of terrorism more difficult, but it would take years to accomplish.

You are correct on all points. The technology to install check valves (BFPV) at each service tap (main) economically is currently available with vacuum truck technology and a drill through then clamp on check valve installation. The problem are company records of how many services exist, the diameter of the service and the type of pipe (copper, ductile, Cast Iron, W. Iron, Steel, Plastic, Galvanised and yes even lead in some locations). The engineering studies would be costly because of the poor record keeping of many (ancient) systems. I will take a SWAG at a unit cost of $1,500 to $1,750 per installation.

I would agree it would take years to retrofit existing, however I would target the larger diameter services (large commerical users) first to get the most efficiency out of the program. Doing the installation at the service tap would greatly reduce the likelyhood of tampering.

However, I can picture it now:

Five middle eastern men were arrested today when they excavated a six foot deep hole in their front yard. It is alleged that the ME men were tampering with the BFP valve when the service tap separated from the main sending a river of water down main street. One of the arrested claimed he was only trying to wash a pair of tennis shoes. Full story at six.

As far:

"Water officials say retrofitting existing structures with the valves would be prohibitively expensive."

I suppose that would depend on what you mean by expensive. I would strongly argue against the notion that it is prohibitively expensive.

[Ditter]

Hi Goldfinch, ask your husband for more info on this. Thanks. ;9)

[glock rocks]

concur. your post is spot on.

[Restorer]

Excellent post.

We cannot make our country safe against attack other than by killing all those who would attack it. Sad, but true.

And something the attackers should have thought seriously about before starting in. Although, from their warped perspective our non-response to their previous, less-efficient attacks essentially were a form of entrapment. We suckered them into this situation, and now they're going to die for it!

[LadyDoc]

I'm not a chemist, so I don't know, but are lead and radioactive plutonium going to react the same way when immersed in water?

Maybe a salt?

I don't know much about plutonium. Lead poisoning is usuall from paint, but there are a few cases due to putting wine into a container that was glazed with lead. Romans got lead poisoning from pipes. And lead batteries have contaminated streams.

If you want to read something frightening, read about "pink disease" caused by mercury poisoning, from industrial waste that was dumped into a Japanese bay and got to people via the fish. There used to be a joke to feed your cats high fat dark meat tuna, since it contained mercury and would kill the cats. I don't know if that was true, but Minnesota Indians are warned not to eat local fish more than twice a week due to pollution.

Again, I can't remember if plutonium or uranium will make a salt. However, you don't really need something that rare.

[PA Engineer]

We posted at the same time. I agree with everything you have said both technically and politically.

[Sabertooth]

If you want to read something frightening, read about "pink disease" caused by mercury poisoning, from industrial waste that was dumped into a Japanese bay and got to people via the fish. There used to be a joke to feed your cats high fat dark meat tuna, since it contained mercury and would kill the cats. I don't know if that was true, but Minnesota Indians are warned not to eat local fish more than twice a week due to pollution.

I grew up drinking "mercury contaminated" water. In the Almaden Valley in San Jose, the Guadalupe Reservoir sits below the old Mercury mines. During a good part of the 19th century, these were the most productive mercury mines in the world. That's where the San Jose Mercury got its name.

Anyway, there were lots of mercury scares back in the 70s, but my Mom still lives there, and I'm not aware of any great epidemic of mercury related illnesses.

Not that mercury isn't toxic, I'm just tossing my experience onto the table.

[Concentrate]

I think that this can be mitigated by having all the local radio stations play Grateful Dead bootlegs for 24 hours after the initial exposure.

LOL!

[Concentrate]

Probably most mercury poisoning comes from broken amalgam fillings in teeth, of which I've got more than several. :)

[piasa]

Just as scary: Lysergic acid diethylamide would render an entire city insane...

Well, that explains Gore Country... not too many wells in Gore Country, all public water distribution systems...

If terrorists didn't consider something as simple as water before they will now... and thanks to the press they have some initial ideas.

[glock rocks]

... and thanks to the press they have some initial ideas.

and... are we are not also the "press"

please, don't underestimate the brain-share horsepower of FR.

[technochick99]

From Post 5 - In most jurisdictions, Back-flow preventors have been required for a decade on new taps for water service.

[Tuscaloosa Goldfinch]

Dh says, without going into a lot of detail, that it's very easy to insert/inject something into the water supply by disabling or going around the valve. The dual check valve 1" is $15 - $20, not including labor.

[JulieRNR21]

This article certainly could give a potential terrorist ideas & intructions on how to accomplish them....

[Alamo-Girl]

Hmmm ... Thanks for the heads up and your analysis!