Backflow water-line attack feared

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.”

Thanks for the bump, Sabertooth.

Thinking off the top of my head, it seems to me that terrorists would have to put a lot of any agent in a water system, otherwise dilution would take care of most of the problem.

My father-in-law is a former President of the American Water Works Association and is still active as a consultant, so I'm going to run this by him. He's on vacation, so it will be a few days before I can ask him. Anyone want a ping?

Whenever a convenient 'date' (like a specific holiday, or religious event) is not available, or just gone by, the media will feed the American public new possibilities we hadn't thought of.

This is needed to keep the public riled up, and supportive of whatever our government is doing.

The true driver of human activity is the pleasure principle. We will do much to achieve pleasure, but we will do ALMOST ANYTHING to avoid pain.

To control a society, you give it pain, then keep convincing it more pain could occur. That society will do anything you want it to.

If terrorists were going to attempt these kind of attacks, they would happen first, then you would get the info about how/why, and what to do.

You wouldn't be fed the info first, like this. It is reasonable for us all to use this information to be as prepared as possible. But don't let it control your life.

THEY WANT US TO BE SCARED. (the big question is: Who, in this case, is THEY ?)

You are right. This is a simple operation but something I would never would have thought of. Now Al_Qaeda and other wack jobs can add this to their can do list.

Look at the extreme panic over anthrax and only a few died. Some scum doing the above will panic millions even though his real physical impact is local and in the thousands.

The scariest water terror scenario I've heard so far would be to take a few grams of plutonium and toss it into a reservoir. Easier than making a bomb, and a coordinated attack could poison a large region. Chlorine would be useless.

All the more reason to continue to pray that President Bush is a man of his word -- and of quite incredible resolve -- and that as the consequence of that resolve and determination -- and of Our Beloved FRaternal Republic's ability to project our immense power far beyond our borders -- that the manifestation of the forces of evil that we call "terrorism" and that and those who drive it -- will be chased to the edges of Hell and beyond -- and be eliminated from the Earth.

Not a good decade, one must hope and pray, for being an inciter, an enabler, a facilitator or a Hitlerist-Marxist-gangster-bastard member of "fatah" or "islamic jihad," the "plo" -- or the much-vaunted "ira!" Etceteras .....

The scariest secnario I can think of has little to do with plutonium but a great deal to do with biologicals. First, one can go to many places commercially and obtain water system pumps that will generate more than the 40lb to 60 lb head pressure of most municipal water systems. The large cities of the East and Midwest have an old water systems. The homes there do not have the check valves and backflow preventers that modern systems are requiring. They just plainly were not installed prior to 1970.

A fifty gallon drum of botulinus toxin introduced into an urban water system would result in thousands of casualties prior to its detection. I cite this because such a scenario has been widely published prior to this. In order to accomplish this attack all the terrorists would need is access to a home water system with commonly available hardware.

Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown

Well said:

Plutonium is extremely heavy- it's not going to migrate very far, is it? Other than irradiating some salts in solution, what would it do? Not that I'd recommend casually handling it, but wouldn't you have to be very close to the material to be affected by it?

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