I am curious if anyone knows how easy it would be for potential terrorists to poison the water supply of a major city-I have several friends that have stopped drinking the water from the tap due to this fear. I don’t want specifics as to how it could possibly be done (I don’t want to give anyone any ideas!!)Is it a real threat? Thank you
The water delivered to your home via pipelines are treated with Chlorine to destroy bacteria that are unhealthful. Therefore it would take an awful lot of bacteria to overcome the chlorine effect.
Not to mention that a city resorvoir is typically very large. It would take a lot of poison (truckloads) to contaminate one. Think of it this way: chlorine by itself is extreamly toxic. How much chlorine do they need to pump into the water just to make it drinkable?
I saw a report on this yesterday. A guy was interviewed who is reponsible for a city’s water supply (I forget which city). In short he said that it would be very difficult to poison a city’s water supply. Reservoirs are HUGE things. The amount of biological and/or chemical components necessary to poison the supply would be staggering and not something anyone could likely do without being caught first. The water itself also has a natural tendency to clean itself up.
In addition the water was tested some 250 times a day and is filtered and cleaned at the treatment plant as a matter of course.
The upshot of the whole thing was that poisoning a water supply would be VERY difficult.
Depends what you put in the water and where you add it. Also depends how well the local water purification plants are working. A bunch of ignorant cud-chewing cows managed to really mess up the water supply in Walkerton ON. However, there were several factors that needed to be present for that to happen. A well-run water system would take some work to contaminate, especially if the gov. was watching for such things… but there are other systems not so “tamper-proof” :eek: Major city? you’re most likely safe.
Wasn’t there a lot of talk in the 60’s about poisoning the water supply with LSD?
If I remember correctly such stories came out during the Chicago Seven trial, and water supplies were protected by the National Guard.
I heard that Allen Ginsburg himself, along with Tim Leary actually tried pouring gallons of the stuff in the water system, though this story has UL written all over it.
It depends on what you want to do. Here in the Vancouver area, people with weak immune systems are instructed not to drink tap water because it contains parasites their body can’t handle.
This summer we also had break-ins at two reservoirs in smaller towns (Langley and Ladysmith). After repeated tests they don’t think anything was put in them. However, there was about a week’s worth of “don’t use for anything” orders in each case for the affected areas. And a run on bottled water.
I’m thinking that an attack on a water supply would most likely be psychological. Something to cause panic and economic disruption, rather than inflict actual casualties.
The logisitcs of actually commiting the sabatage are close to insurmountable, but trying to make it look like an attack had been made wouldn’t be too difficult, and would likely cause much consternation.
Not to pick on Tranquilis in particular, but I don’t think you folks have sufficiently devious imaginations. Logistics impossible? reservoirs are big open bodies of water. If you can fly a plane into a building, how much easier is it to down a plane in a lake?
Chemical poisoning (read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Certainly possible. Biological position? More difficult, but still, you can get a psychological effect.
What if someone flew a small plane full of low-level atomic waste into the local reservoir? Lots of psychological effects there. You can up the ante considerably if you use U-238, which isn’t fissile, so people aren’t looking at it as carefully. Heck, we give it away in the form of depleted uranium bullets.
The reservoir is not drinking water. Crash anything into it. All it does is supply water to the treatment plant. The treatment costs may go up if they have to use more chemicals and change filters more often, but that would be the only effect.
Atomic waste, other in huge amounts, won’t be a problem. It would have a long term effect on things like cancer rates. But once you learn of it, you can change the water treatment and it’s gone, so the damage is limited. You stop it before it accumulates in peoples’ bodies.
Filters won’t stop soluble products. And, in any case, the psychological effect will be enormous. People probably won’t be convinced you can really get everything out. Bottled water sales will skyrocket.
Nor are the reservoir and water treatment plant the only places at which a cities water supply could be contaminated.
Cal’s scenario would likely cause a LOT of problems in the short term. There are also all sorts of other ways to go about achieving the “unthinkable”.
New York water, to the best of my knowledge, is unfiltered. In fact, there was a big deal a couple years ago because the bacterial concentration was rising and the state was considering forcing the city to install water purification plants (at some enormous cost). The city decided it was cheaper to buy up more watershed land and keep it clean than purify it at the endpoint. And last I checked, New York was considered a terrorist target.
However, I have been told (by a person who was trying to go boating) that the resevoirs are closed to boats and truck traffic, and have police boats and helicopters patroling them. Unfortunately, I don’t know how long that will last.
I agree that biological warfare seems challenging given the size of the container that you need to contaiminate, but what about poisons/affective agents that only require very low concentrations? Botulin (the poison produced by botulism bacteria), LSD or other hallucinagenics, nerve agents? I know that some of these require horrifyingly low concentrations to work, but I don’t know what that means in terms of how much you need for an entire resevoir.
And crashing something into the resevoir doesn’t seem like a viable plan to me. It would be noticed. If we know that the water is contaminated, we can live on bottled water until it has been clean up, or evacuate. A major pain in the butt, but relatively non-fatal. Nothing compared to the death tolls and panic you would get from a secret poison or psychoactive agent in the water.
mischievous
We’re still taking about needing massive amounts of material to properly crap-up the water. An airplane’s worth or material isn’t going to do it, unless you’re taking about a major jetliner, and there are more effctive ways of using them. Alternatively, I suppose you could back up several large dump-trucks worth of contaminant to the resevior and dump it in, but that’s really d*mn obvious and is grossly inefficient: Much of the material will just sink, and not disolve right away, so you’d need far more than the necessary minimum to get immediate effects, and even then, it has to spread, so is unlikely to give lethal effects before being caught and handled.
Soluable material? Well, water treatment plants deal with that stuff all the time. No, I don’t know the precise process, but I’m pretty sure it works, or they’d not be able to regulate things like, say, arsenic levels.
DU bullets? Hah! They’d sink to the bottom, and you’d never hear from them again. The issue with DU-cored bullets is from when they strike something hard, giving off sublimed Uranium vapor. How about powdered Plutonium? That stuff is poisonous as all hell, but even that would be more effective being sprayed from a crop duster. It’s heavy, and tends to sink to the bottom, where it will make the sediment toxic, and slowly leach back into the water, over the course of years. It’ll also plate out on metalic surfaces, with much the same effect. Bad in the long-haul, but unlikely to kill anyone soon.
Now, if you could gain undetected control of a treatment plant or pumping station for a few hours, that’s different. Even still, you’d have to get in, pollute the water (still needing lots &lots of pollutants), and get out, without anyone knowing about it for some hours after you’re gone, if you want to cause casualties.
On the other hand, simply abandoning a dump truck at the resevior’s edge, preferably with traces of toxic material in the bed, and then calling one or two TV and Radio stations, would be very effective, indeed. For a minimum of effort, you’ll spread terror and panic, and force civil authorities to implace very expensive controls. That strikes me as very d*mn devious.
Cause you’ll most likely just end up with a lake contaminated by broken airplane parts and possibly some jet fuel. Liquid chemicals are very heavy and thus not easily transported by air.
Works of fiction are not considered evidence.
Depleted uranium bullets are not radioactive.
According to this [url=“http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/sciobs95/sciobs95-03.html”]article in the Science Observer, plutonium is overrated as a mass poison (the plutonium section is half-way down the page).
Arjuna34
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**Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ** isn’t fiction. Read the chapter on the guy who carried the bottle of poison.
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I didn’t propose firing depleted Uranium bullets intio a lake – I merely suggested that it was a source of radioactive material. You can grind it up (carefully) or react it chemically. It most certainly IS radioactive – the “depleted” means that it has less U235 than it naturally would, but both the U238 and residual U235 (and other isotopes) are most certainly radioactive. If it’s dissolved rather than in metallic form it won’t sink to the bottom.
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Even if you dropped U238 bullets that promptly buried themselves in the mud, people would continue to be freaked for years.
There was a case after WWII where an Israeli terrorist group tried to poison the water supply for a POW camp that housed some Nazi officers. They tried pouring arsenic in the water. It gave people an upset stomach for a day and that was about it. I came across this in an April 2000 “Current History” magazine.
I would worry more about a cryptosporidium outbreak in your water supply like Milwaukee had a few years back. The problem with that is takes a while before public health officials can figure out what is going on.
Even a soluable chemical containing Uranium will sink. It’s heavy, and will settle out of solution (is there water-soluable unranium-containing chemical?). Sure, more will be available to make it to the treatment plant, but not in appreciable amounts.
There’s few poorer methods I can think of for obtaining large quantities of uranium than milling down surplus ammunition. The qantities are availabe small, the work per projectile is large, the yield per projectile is low, and you’d need tons and tons of uranium powder to be anything near effective. Milling it down would take forever, and the controls necessary to keep from contaminating oneself are prohobitive outside of a sophisticated industrial shop. Even assuming that you’ve got suicide machinists working for you, it’s very low efficiency, very messy, and prone to early detection. Also, as radioacive elements go, Uranium isn’t all that deadly, but inhaling enough of it will certainly kill your machinists in short order, while dumping it into most reseviors will dilute it past being any serious threat.
Far easier to go with a less exotic material, like rat poison.
Well, no arguing with that, but you’d do the same with a truck-load of rat poison, far easier, and with much less chance of being stopped, and with very similar effects (few, if any, casualties, much panic).
A nice little analogy I seem to remember reading somewhere (New Scientist?)…
In theory a teaspoonful of Botulin etc. could be used to kill off squillions of people through adding it to drinking water.
By the same token, a kitchen fork could be used to kill the entire population of a small country were said populus
willing to stand in a row and be stabbed one after the other.
I suppose, in addition to everything else, only a tiny fraction of the water leaving treatment plants would be ingested anyway, provided the plant was not supplying exclusively bottled water.
That said, a frightening prospect all the same.