Backflow water-line attack feared

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

[Sabertooth]

Happy New Year to you too, Pussycat!

[snopercod]

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.

Calm down, my friend. This article, and your comment are both...well...unfounded in reality.

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.

Backflow preventers have vacuum breakers - that's the difference from simple check valves.

If you're really worried about this stuff, use bottled water, distill/filter your own, collect rainwater, or better yet, move to the country.

This whole scare is just union propaganda to scare the gullible into clamoring for more union workers to "make their water safe".

[glock rocks]

Trust me on this, I went to Berkeley.

oxymoron.

[Sabertooth]

oxymoron

Redundancy!

[Lazamataz]

Ping for further preparation....

[VA Advogado]

I find it hard to believe your bycycycle pump or vaccum cleaner can overcome the 40-60psi of water coming into your home.

[VA Advogado]

Boil Orders aren't carefully followed in instances of benign contamination during a flood.

That shouldn't be the pain in the butt it has been in years past with all the bottled water out there. But yeah, for the other stuff it would suck.

[glock rocks]

Redundancy!

touche...

...but it would appear, from the recent actions of the berzerkely city council,
that the acid scenario was a success.

[nunya bidness]

That's a damn lie and you know it!

[SusanUSA]

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.

Yikes!

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

Also, how would you prevent terrorists from disabling them?

See this article. I think it will answers those questions of yours.

D'Angelo refers to the ABPA's policy statement that says that a single check valve will not be construed to be an adequate backflow prevention technique. He asks: "What about two check valves? Detector check and alarm check? Detector check and wafer check? Are two check valves an adequate backflow prevention technique? What is an assembly?" Of course, D'Angelo hits the nail right on the head.

This is the question that has never been answered by any legislator or backflow preventer manufacturer. And the reason for this is that there is nothing to be accomplished by a backflow prevention assembly that is not accomplished just as well with two weighted check valves. Both configurations represent "double-check" backflow protection.

[alloysteel]

Years ago, when I kept milk cows, the water supply system for sanitation of the milk equipment had to meet certain standards, one of which was to make sure that the devices used to provide drinking water supplies had "anti-siphon" valves, so the water from the stock tank would not backwash into the water supply lines. It was a simple air break, so when the flow of water stopped through a valve, the siphoning effect was broken immediately. Where a faucet overhangs a sink, there is a natural "air break" as long as the water does not rise to the mouth of the faucet. The method is as simple as that.

[Sir Gawain]

No, you're the liar. Remember when you said you had that Porsche? Well, I haven't seen it yet.

[cardinal4]

1.) End immigration from the Mideast (and the third world in general).

2.) Kill all terrorist and their sponsors.

3.) Remove barriers to energy self-sufficiency.

- or -

4.) Die.

Makes sense to me.

[Archie Bunker on steroids]

But if there’s an intentional attempt to create a backflow, there’s no way to totally prevent it.”

"We would've never worked on chemical/biological/nuclear weapons of mass destruction if the western press didn't continually repeat how easy it would be to do".

Just keep reporting this over and over until the ragheads figure it out and try it.

[Restorer]

Backflow valves at every branch in the water mains are going to be needed to localize any problem. Something else to worry about.

This is the only thing that would work. If I were a terrorist and there was a backflow preventer on the plumbing where I wanted to inject the poison, all I would need to do is disable it.

BTW, a bicycle pump or vacuum cleaner would have a lot of difficulty overcoming city water pressure. Not sure I understand how that would work.

What would work beautifully is the wide variety of pumps available for various purposes. Just look in your Gringer's catalog. Literally hundreds of workable pumps can be purchased from under a hundred dollars and up.

I used to do pressure washing, so I have some familiarity with pumps. Trust me, this ain't rocket science. I could do it in a couple of hours if I wanted to, starting from scratch.

[LadyDoc]

can we purify the water with Chlorox, or just drink bottled water? Are they worried about chemicals or bacteria?

We worry about LSD, but Cholera or even Giardia would make a lot of people sick. And you can get giardia from most mountain streams thanks to the lack of indoor toilets for beavers...

[research99]

Credit where credit is due: The "LSD in the Reservoir" concept was advocated in "Wild in the Streets," a 1968 AIP picture before it was presented by YIP. Screenwriter: Robert Thom.

[ho-hum]

Once again I keep asking who is the enemey and I keep coming back to the same answer its the media. This article is another perfect example which tells any unstable and loose cannon out there how to perform a harmful act. For proof that this is true and you don't want my word for it there was a small article out about the Taliban not realizing that chem/bio weapons were simple to make until they read some news article. Shame on WSJ and MSNBC for helping the enemies of our country.

[Restorer]

And you can get giardia from most mountain streams thanks to the lack of indoor toilets for beavers...

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." Or I did think it was funny till I got giardiasis. That wasn't funny at all!

[Restorer]

In Portland, Ore., alarms are now triggered by smaller drops in water pressure than in the past.

Don't understand this. If I create a high enough pressure to force chemicals back into the main line, wouldn't that cause the pressure to go up in the system, not down?