“The idea of poisoning drinking water goes back a long way,” said James Salzman, a professor of law and environmental policy at Duke University and author of Drinking Water: A History. The Roman emperor Nero is said to have poisoned his enemies’ wells in the first century. J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over threats to the water supply during World War II.
For all the drama of someone slipping poison into a reservoir, however, the reality is that many of the threats to both drinking water and wastewater are more mundane, ranging from wildfires to maintenance issues.
The infrastructure for drinking water is massive. From treatment plants to the distribution network, it consists of millions of miles of pipes and has millions of access points. “When you just look at the numbers, it’s obvious that the drinking water system is impossibly big to completely protect,” Salzman said. “That’s the bad news. The good news is that our systems are designed intentionally to protect against threats.”
The myriad threats eventually creep into the emergency management realm. During a disaster, it’s imperative to have access to potable water. There are instances where a hazard — natural or man-made — can turn into a disaster because of contamination to drinking water.
There are, of course, small-scale “instances every year where the system fails, and there are boil water alerts,” Salzman said. “In terms of drinking water, we can get that into a disaster area quickly. The concern is sanitation: How do you get the waste away?” If sewage contaminates the water supply, there’s a risk of cholera, typhoid and other diseases. “You’re basically back in the 19th century.”
There are many sources of threats to the water supply, some caused by humans, either intentionally or unintentionally, and some natural. Although in movies, the villain may sneak up to a reservoir and pull a test tube full of poison out of his coat, the reality is that with most chemicals in most reservoirs, it would not be nearly that easy.
“You’d need several dump trucks of cyanide or arsenic to poison a large water supply,” Salzman said. It would be difficult to acquire that much poison without attracting notice, let alone get it into the reservoir. Then there’s the fact that the reservoir water is monitored, so authorities would realize something was wrong.
The system is constantly under attack from biological threats, Salzman said. Whether the problem happens naturally or is introduced intentionally, the water system has built-in protections such as chlorination. “Cholera is bad whether it occurs naturally or is put into the reservoir, and the system is designed to neutralize that,” he said.
| Government officials are expressing concern about cyberattacks as a threat to the United States’ infrastructure. Water systems are no exception. With cyberattacks, “you can do it to multiple water systems at the same time, and you don’t have to be local,” said Joe Weiss, managing partner of Applied Control Solutions, a cybersecurity consulting company. And attacks by other nations aren’t the only issue. Some cybersecurity problems reported so far have been unintentional. Weiss said that with the proper training, policies and system architecture, the water infrastructure can be protected in most cases from unintentional cybersecurity problems, disgruntled employees and unsophisticated hackers. Protecting the water supply from the most sophisticated cyberattacks — such as those from a foreign government — is more difficult because most countries use similar equipment, so they all know its vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Weiss said, because the U.S. could launch similar attacks, countries may be less inclined to start this kind of conflict. There is always a trade-off between performance and security. “For performance, you want to have everybody able to talk to each other,” Weiss said. “For security, it’s exactly the opposite: You want the system as closed as you can make it.” |
Still, disrupting the water supply via a cyberattack “would require a very high level of sophistication,” Salzman said. One of the easiest ways to disrupt any type of infrastructure would be to blow it up. The water system is as vulnerable as other types of infrastructure.
Wildfires can cause runoff that pollutes the water supply. Earthquakes can break pipes and shut off electricity, preventing the movement of water. Hurricanes and even droughts can wreak havoc on water systems.
“Texas has seen significant and widespread damage to both wastewater and drinking water facilities as a result of hurricanes,” Clawson said. “As a result of Hurricane Ike in 2008, some residents in the Houston area were without power and water for up to four weeks.” (Subsequent legislation requires public drinking water systems in specific Texas counties to develop plans to demonstrate how they will operate in emergency conditions.)
A slow-moving natural disaster, drought is nonetheless a major problem in some areas. The drought that started in 2011 caused some systems in Texas to experience a significant decrease in their water supply. To address drought-related problems, the TCEQ works with other state agencies on state-level emergency assistance. “As an example, state agency partners developed the Emergency Drinking Water Annex, a document that details management and response for public water systems with 180 days or less of water supply,” Clawson said. In addition, “the TCEQ intensively monitors a targeted list of public water systems that have either limited or an unknown supply of water remaining.”
The U.S. does a poor job of maintaining its water infrastructure, according to the 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, released in March by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
The group rated several U.S. infrastructure types, and the ratings for the water-related categories were poor: D for dams, D for drinking water, D- for levees, and D for wastewater.
Issues can arise from the age of the nation’s water infrastructure. There are places in the U.S. where the pipes were laid just after the Civil War, Salzman said.
“We as Americans need to be proactive in monitoring and taking care of our infrastructure so that it will be here not only for us, but for our children and our grandchildren,” said ASCE President Gregory E. DiLoreto in a statement.
But as with other types of infrastructure, it can be difficult to persuade the public to spend money to upgrade and maintain water pipes and the rest of the infrastructure. “We don’t want to pay for upgrading infrastructure,” Salzman said. “We don’t think about our infrastructure, for water particularly, because it’s buried.”
This may be a larger threat than terrorist attacks or natural disasters (though older infrastructure could be more vulnerable to these).
“I think they’re doing a good job at addressing external threats,” Salzman said. “The overall integrity of the system is a serious issue. Our system is aging, and we’re paying the price. We can pay now or we can pay later, but the system is aging.”
Infrastructure concerns don’t end with the water system. “Roughly 20 percent of California’s electricity is used to move water,” Salzman said. “When you knock out electricity, you’re also knocking out the water supply system.”
One of the biggest roadblocks to addressing these threats, especially infrastructure, is money — because there are “so many competing interests,” said Jeff Crockett, water treatment manager for the Colorado Springs Utilities. “We have aging infrastructure; we’re dealing with all the different strains on our time and resources.”
Water resource managers and emergency managers must balance many considerations in addressing these risks. “Magnitude and probability of the risks is central in how we plan to further develop our system and manage our system to maintain reliable water service,” said Mark Shea, watershed planning supervisor of the Water Services Division of the Colorado Springs Utilities.
There are two main strategies, Salzman said: Harden the system against intentional or naturally occurring threats, and have a back-up plan. “When the system goes down, how quickly is it back up?” Salzman said. “What’s your Plan B?”
For Colorado’s large, diverse system, Plan B often means relying on a different part of the system. “When we get runoff from the Waldo Canyon Fire, we can shut off the pump station and divert the water so we do not bring that poor-quality water into the treatment plant,” Crockett said.
This redundancy, though it adds to the cost and complexity, is very helpful for emergency planning. However, some water systems’ geography does not allow for this kind of response.
“We’ve spent considerable effort on reviewing every piece of infrastructure that we can protect from security threats,” said Andy Funchess, field operations manager for the Colorado Springs Utilities. And the organization rehearses its Plan B. “We’ve also performed various exercises through the Business Continuity Group to be able to properly react to these sorts of things should they happen.”
Drills and planning are an integral part of many emergency managers’ water plans. California is planning a statewide drill in May, Golden Guardian, that will simulate a catastrophic earthquake. For Santa Clara County officials, the focus will be on water.
The county’s emergency managers are using the exercise to activate a water management plan that’s been in the works for the past year, said Cindy Stewart, emergency planning coordinator of Santa Clara County. The exercise will highlight the interdependence of different parts of the infrastructure. “We’re going to play that one of our water retailers has lost power and has a backup generator that’s not working.” The portable generator that could restore water service to several cities is the size of a semitruck.
“We’ll have to figure out how to get it here past roads and bridges that are closed,” Stewart said.
Emergency responders have concerns beyond getting power back to the water suppliers. Public health officials must determine whether the water is safe and for what type of activity. (It could be safe for watering lawns, for example, but not for drinking.)
| Wildfires are becoming more intense and causing many different problems for water systems, which requires a varied approach to problem solving. The fire itself can damage treatment plants or other infrastructure. Denver Water’s structures have been spared by recent fires it’s faced, said Ken Pollock, Denver Water’s superintendent of water quality. “But other utilities in the area have had the fire literally at their water treatment plant door.” This first stage of the crisis is resolved usually within days, but that doesn’t end the threat to the water supply. “The bigger challenge is changes to the watershed,” Pollock said. “You have all the ash. All vegetation is gone. That creates a problem when it rains, particularly if you have a big rainstorm, because there’s nothing to hold the soils in place.” In Colorado, afternoon thunderstorms can be intense. When a storm dumps a lot of rain quickly on an area already hit by a fire, sediment, ash and burned trees can clog the waterways. “During the floods that follow the fires, treatment plants can become overwhelmed very quickly with sediment,” Pollock said. Treatment plants must add more chemicals to the water to treat it effectively and sometimes must decrease production at the affected plant or shift that load to unaffected facilities. To address these problems, Denver Water works to alleviate the immediate impact and prevent problems. For prevention, Denver Water teamed with the local U.S. Forest Service region to improve forest and watershed conditions. The utility hired Becky Martinez as manager of emergency response in 2012 to help coordinate its disaster response with other entities. Denver Water must coordinate with 12 county emergency management offices, and this communication hasn’t always been a focus. “I’m observing that all of our water systems are kind of a separate entity,” Martinez said. “We’re making great strides in contacting all of the [local] emergency managers.” |
Communicating with the public is also a huge part of an emergency official’s job — and a big challenge, especially when the power has gone out.
The TCEQ has various information available before events, if they’re predicted, and also after. Topics include getting safe drinking water, determining if water is safe to drink, disinfecting private wells and boil water notices.
“In a disaster, there may be power outages and lack of Internet access in impacted areas. To provide necessary information to the public and regulated entities, TCEQ will determine and activate other means of distributing information,” Clawson said. This could include phone calls or onsite visits.
Texas learned from reviews of how it handled Hurricane Ike in 2008 that while the response was successful in many areas, the state could benefit from better data management, coordination and reporting. Working with federal partners, Texas created a Natural Disaster Operational Workgroup to establish common protocols for multi-agency disaster response. The group developed standardized procedures, forms and data collection standards, which were used successfully during the 2010 Rio Grande Valley flooding.
For local officials, the message that goes out to the public may vary depending on what’s wrong with the water and who’s affected.
“The first messaging issue is, when you turn on your faucet and no water comes out, what do you do?” Stewart said. “If you can’t flush your toilet, what do you do? In a major, catastrophic earthquake, after two weeks that could be a huge issue.”
Local emergency management officials have several ways to tell people, for example, that they need to boil their water. They can broadcast on TV and radio (they encourage people to have battery-operated radios), use the emergency alert phone system or send workers door to door if necessary. Santa Clara County has a strong network of volunteer ham radio operators who also can help deliver the message.
Crafting the message also is critical. “If there’s no water in Los Altos but there is in Saratoga, how do we handle letting the public know without creating a mad rush from one city to another?” Stewart said. “We have to be sure we don’t create chaos in the middle of a disaster.”
Beyond the immediate messages about whether the water is safe and where to get some, it would help for more members of the public to understand what goes into making sure that every time they turn on the tap, safe drinking water comes out.
