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.”

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!

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?

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