EPA press release on Williamsburg youth job training, Dec 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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 he difficult for them to actually spot the mi­ nor 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 at­ tack originating in a single home or apart­ ment 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, pro­ viding residual protection agamst some toxins,, according to Tom Curtis, deputy director of the American Water Works As­ sociation,. which represents 4,300 public and private water utilities. At the Cleveland Division of Water, offi­ cials are considering adding more chlorine in areas where residual levels are low, says Julius Ciaccia Jr., Cleveland’s water com­ missioner. Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, some utilities had begun replacing the chlo­ rine 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 draw­ backs, however. “You can only go so far be­ fore .people begin to complain about the taste,” says Mr. Curtis. The only sure way of preventing a back- flow attack, water officials says, is install­ ing valves to prevent water fi-om flowing back into the pipes. Many homes have such valves on toilets and boilers. But vir­ tually 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 prohib­ itively expensive. “We’re used to natural incidents. We’re ready for them,” says Mr. Sullivan of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agen­ cies. “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.”

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