|
EH PrepCast #2
This is a complete transcript of EH PrepCast #2 : Water Safety and Security
Mitch Stripling: Good afternoon and welcome to our Environmental Health Prep Cast for March . I'm here today with Van Hoofnagle, who heads up the Drinking Water Program for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and Bob Vincent, anenvironmental administrator with the Bureau of Waterat the Florida Department of Health. Good afternoon, gentlemen.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Good afternoon.
MR. VINCENT: Hey Mitch.
MR. STRIPLING: Hey. And we're here today to talkabout water safety and security. Ben Grumbles, who is an assistant administrator for water at the USEPA, he said that drinking water utilities can be vulnerable to a variety of attacks, through physical assault, intentional contamination and cyber intrusion. I would just like to start there talking about these intentional threats.Van, if I could ask you what is the risk to the water system from intentional attacks like these?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, there certainly is a risk. I think fortunately since / of , we haven't noted any intentional attacks as you traditionally think of it from terrorists, and certainly we've had on the radar screen the possibility of the introduction of contaminants into the water system or distribution system as well as other sorts of attacks. What we have seen and for the last several years is the more traditional kind of intentional attack. I may be getting ahead of myself, but we have been monitoring since about reported instances of concern or incidents at our treatment plants. We have a regulation that we put into effect right after September of . And for the last few years, we get about to calls from operators of the public or utilities regarding an incident that may have occurred in a particular plant.
MR. STRIPLING: And what types of incidents are those?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, they are traditionally such things as locks that are broken, intruders have come over the fence, things are missing, perhaps they forgot to lock their doors, any kinds of things that could have put their plant at risk.It doesn't necessarily mean that there was an intruder, someone was at the plant. We have not had a contamination event, but we have had the suspicious activities occur.Now, the Department of Homeland Security has recently begun to do the same kinds of water incident reports. While I earlier mentioned we are recording about a year, initially back in there was like a year, there was like ay ear, so it's falling off a bit.But Homeland Security also issued a report, which is called their Water Sector Incident Report, and they looked at the entire United States,and they found such instances at water plants,where in Florida they said that we only had . So I'm not sure the databases are the same or the kinds of threats are similar.When we did put our regulations into place backing the early s, we pretty much mandated that utility operator of a treatment plant within two hours of noticing something suspicious would cal lour emergency response folks, our emergency operations center through a state warning point type of number, and that person will then make a decision based upon what the operator has told him about whether or not we need to get law enforcement, the labs involved for water testing and so forth.We characterize an incident through a system of levels, and percent of the time they are what we call level one or no risk to the water, it's something that happened but it didn't pose a risk to the public.
MR. STRIPLING: So Florida has been ahead of the nation in tracking and recording these incidents?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: I can't speak for all of the states, but it's hard to imagine that within a few months after / we had a system up and running,and we actually expanded an older system, that the other states were too far ahead of us in thatregard.So we've had several years now, five or six years of doing this, and we've been very pleased both with our response to this as well as the fact that we haven't had a traditional terrorist attack.What has always been a traditional kind of intentional attack and what we have seen as incident reports is not acts of terrorism but acts of vandalism. It's the teen-age, it's the person who breaks in to recover the softball that's gone over the fence or a normal theft. So we're fortunate that way.
MR. STRIPLING: So not exactly a high caliber threat level, it seems like at least historically that it 'snot?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Historically, no. But the point here is that the utility itself needs procedures in place to deal with prevention and response to those kinds of instances or disgruntled operators or teen-ages that come over the fence.You know, there's always a great worry that teenager will get to the water supply and do something, throw something into the water, sort of -- almost a prankster or spur of the moment kind of incident.
MR. VINCENT: And yet each time that those incidents occur, it's a test of their system or attest of the security reporting program that Van mentioned of the state warning point. So each incident that is reported is responded to by the utility. And of course, fortunately so far nothing has been severe.
MR. STRIPLING: And if there were a contamination event, the Department of Health would be part of that investigation; is that correct?
MR. VINCENT: Yes.
MR. STRIPLING: And how would that work, that process?
MR. VINCENT: We would in the fact that we have an umber of laboratories around the state and one central laboratory that can run chemical tests and biological tests on drinking water in a fairly rapid program. We can do those in concert with the federal agencies that assist us, both with the FBI and CDC,but we have got a pretty good setup now with our Regional Food and Water Borne Disease Outbreak specialists and our county health departments in all counties. We have some test kits that they have on supply and ready to use should some kind of incident occur that would warrant the sampling of the water.And then we would jointly with the police and DEP look into the aspects of what sort of disease occurrence might occur or chemical exposure might occur and make recommendations and public outreach messages so that the public could be warned immediately if there is something serious. And, of course, we would share all of this information with the law enforcement folks so that they could attempt to apprehend any perpetrator that might have been involved in this.
MR. STRIPLING: Let me ask one thing before we sort of move on. We talked about physical security and investigation. One of the things I think the publicist concerned about a lot regarding this is talking about biological weapons or chemical contamination,whatever the historical track record is.How difficult would it be to do something like that? Is this something that we should be worried about or is it the kind of threat that's thrown out, that isn't something that is at all likely?
MR. VINCENT: Well, we haven't seen anything of that nature, which is the good news. I think it's kind of a mixed feeling about how successful an attack would be .Security around most of the larger plants is excellent. The amount of contamination or contaminant that would have to be added to the water would have to be extremely large because of just the dilutions that you can see as it goes through the water system. I mean, Bob can probably answer better on that particular aspect of the health aspects of the adding of a biological contaminant.We do require in this state -- it's not always required in all states -- but two-thirds of the states do require by law chemical disinfections, so great number of the biological agents does exist in a barrier protection there.
MR. STRIPLING: One thing that we have seen certainly in past years, even while we haven't really seen intentional threats, are natural disasters. Just togo back to Ben Grumbles from the EPA, one thing that he said at the American Waterworks Association Water Security Congress, this was September nth of last year, he said Hurricanes Katrina's and Rita's devastation speaks directly to the need to adopt anally hazards approach. Utilities may not be concerned with terrorism, but the potentials for hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages or realizing operational efficiencies may resonate strongly without utilities.He's essentially saying, you know, these preparation things that we do need to be focused on all hazards. Hurricanes we get a lot, other things like that.What are some of the things, Van, that a natural disaster can do to a water system that needs to be prepared for?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, I think you mentioned them all. You could include things like wild fires as well and even droughts, which of course droughts you have to look at more response time on. A lot of money was put into this particular program by the federal government obviously after/ for the purposes of planning and developing response systems in case of a terrorist attack. We recognized early that there was a lot of residual benefit that we could get from this money by having an all hazards approach.So when we strengthened our emergency response laws within the Drinking Water Program, we now require communities to have an emergency response plan all the way down to people served, and the federal government would have a much higher standard there or a much lower standard you might say.We also asked that they look at things like the droughts, the hurricanes, the wild fires, tornados and so forth. So they have looked at -- we've take nan all hazards approach for at least five years in our particular regulations.And the fact that every utility of any significant size serving more than people has an emergency response plan to look at how they are going to notify the public, who they are going to contact, how they are going to isolate the problem is in place.With hurricanes it's not so much -- and wildfires and so forth -- it's not so much contamination issue, it's a loss of service issue and primarily through power loss. But you can also have, especially with hurricanes, the uprooting of your distribution system for the water, you can have your wastewater system go down but not your water system. Well, do you want to provide water while you can't treat the water or move it from home?So a lot of the coordination has been done.And the utilities, you know, to their credit, have taken most of the lead on this because they are the first line of defense.
MR. STRIPLING: Well, what are the practical effects? I mean, in a major storm -- and we've had sort of laboratory for hurricanes over the past few years --how long is a citizen's water likely to go out or visit likely to go at all and if it is are there statistics or numbers we can relate for when they could expect service back or is it entirely case-by-case basis?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, we've seen, as you said, laboratory in ' and ' here in Florida. And unfortunately many of the areas of the states have been impacted, and so we've seen the biggest utilities even with all of the backup and infrastructure that they have and all of the personnel still go down and have electricity problems because of the huge power outage grids that are taken out. So, you know, depending on where you are and depending on how quickly -- or how small the location of the power outages are depends a great deal on how soon you'll get water pressure back.And then after the water pressure comes back,there's a certain amount of testing that utilities want to do for bacteria to make sure that they haven't had any infiltration, and that could take couple more days. So, I mean, sometimes you're looking at being down for just a couple of days,sometimes for several weeks.
MR. STRIPLING: Well, in that period -- this was something that really interested me during my research for this -- Marcia St. Martin, who is the executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, her take on Katrina was in the hour sand sometimes days following a hurricane or other natural disaster, water utilities are largely on their own in making the case that preparing for worse case scenarios is critical .I mean, is there an isolation period for utilities -- is that a fair characterization -- in the state of Florida? I'm seeing Bob shaking his head.
MR. VINCENT: Yeah, I don't think so. Katrina unfortunately, besides being a disaster itself,wasn't as much as just the hurricane striking and knocking out all of the systems, it was the fact that they were under water, they had a dam break and they lost their levies.
MR. STRIPLING: Right.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: That's not what a hurricane normally does. There may be some facilities that get storm surge by the beaches here in Florida, but traditionally you don't have the kind of devastation where you're totally immobilized, everybody is gone,everything is gone. The closest I think we got to that was Andrew, in which you had part of the state that looked like a moon landscape.
MR. VINCENT: And there we weren't really prepared. We hadn't set up these emergency operations procedures and didn't have good mutual aid going on with the utilities .I think that's the key to what happened in the last -- well, after ', the beginning of ', many of the utilities got together in a mutual aid association called FlaW ARN that was patterned after other states. And they've literally set up aid compacts so that they can come to each other's rescue, just like the power companies, you see trucks from Canada and Arkansas here, you could see water trucks from Jacksonville going to Miami and from Miami going to Pentacle. So that's a real benefit. And then the other group that your agency contracts with, Van, is the Florida Rural Water Association. They have circuit riders out there helping the utilities too.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Right. And they sometimes can bringing their own equipment. The idea of the utilities helping utilities is critical because the government itself is not going to be able to do a great deal as far as recovery is concerned. We connect the power,we don't build the lines itself from the state and so forth.We may help coordinate some of the communications for that, help government direct funds where they're needed and keep the information flowing on what areas are in great need. But this utility-helping-utility process that we have calendula is critical.My advice to both utilities out there and citizens served by the utility is get your utility to join FlaW ARN It's free and it means that you don't get on the bottom of some waiting list and you have sister utilities who within hours will be putting trucks on the road, generators on the road,staff on the road and assisting you to recover as quickly as possible.
MR. VINCENT: It's flawarn.org at the University of Florida right now?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Yes.
MR. VINCENT: Fl awarn.org.
MR. STRIPLING: And one of the things about FlaW ARN and other mutual aid aspects that's different than allot of other governments is that they are voluntary. I mean, these are things utilities choose to do.It's not a heavily regulatory approach.Do you think that that's the way to go in these situations rather than trying to (inaudible)?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Right. You remember the person who got all the blame for the response to Katrina was either the government's local or state involved and especially FEMA got a lot of bad press and there were mistakes made, as they acknowledged.In the FlaW ARN process, they keep us surprised and we assist them in the communications of this,but they shortcut the red tape and the bureaucracy.We do ensure the paperwork is in place for the funds recovery and so forth and reporting out.But this is what has been the saving grace that we've had so far. And it worked well in . Even with the best systems in place though, the citizen shave to realize, as Bob said earlier, if you're one of the lucky ones, it may be two days, but you can expect -- even in with Wilma, there were portions of Beard County that were without power for two weeks.
MR. VINCENT: Right. And there you run into problems with a lot of tall buildings too. You know, if you got no power for the elevators, it' shard for people to get up and down stairs with supplies, so that presented a special problem.And your question earlier was kind of interesting, you asked if we should have these cooperative things or regulatory things. Well, we need both .I mean, obviously regulatory things are set up to make all of the water systems come up to some level of preparedness, and yet the FlaW ARN and Rural Water Association Circuit Riders help people go beyond that and they can help each other and really make a difference.
MR. STRIPLING: And that leads to the question. You know, we've talked about mutual aid. There were regulatory things like the Public Health Security and Bio terrorism Act for Water that have lifted up.What are those regulatory or other things that the agencies are doing to help protect the water systems as opposed to the utilities or responding to those events?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, we had mentioned earlier the state warning point. We mentioned our basically coordination on FlaW ARN You know, they do most of the work. We sit on the committees. We directed some of our security funds for the development of that program as they have in other states.We also went out and strengthened our regulations on physical security.
MR. STRIPLING: Okay.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: So there is some things there. And in recent years, we have tightened up our operator certification program. Operators now require training every year. We introduce our security training at that level, at every chance that we get we put on mock exercises for utilities andoperators.We have intensive inspections and valuations we do of treatment plants, and we go and we look and make sure that they have their emergency response plans available, that they're aware of what they are to do in case of emergency. But that's pretty much what we are doing from the regulatory aspects.
MR. VINCENT: On the disease side too, we've said that clinical labs and hospitals, doctors, must report certain diseases that are terrorism related to the state health office within a certain timeframe, very short period of time if they see those in the field.And of course if you ever see that, then you know that you've got some kind of incident going on.It may not be from water, it could be from other sources, but that would initiate a big response from the Department of Health to look at those disease sand their cause and transmission.
MR. STRIPLING: And health does have employees in the field as DEP does I think doing backup sampling or assisted sampling and things like that, it's part of the field response.Is that something our approved counties do?
MR. VINCENT: Yeah. Many of the approved counties have a sampling program; although, it's not in addition to requirements so much as they are trying to do it for the requirements of the utility. And they have set these up over the past in some of the bigger counties.But each water system is required to sample ascertain amount each month for bacteria and each year for chemistry. And those things are for the regular compliance to see if the groundwater or the surface water is treated adequately.But many of the utilities have gone ahead and bought special testing ability and many of them have their own laboratories where they can run tests to see if any kind of incidents have occurred that might change the water quality that would injure people. So that's going on at the same time.
MR. STRIPLING: And I don't want to belabor, you know, talking about sampling. Sampling might not bethel most interesting thing to focus on. But one thing that we hear a lot of questions on after disasters that gets a lot of focus are boiled waternotices.Im wondering if you could just talk for second about what those are and, you know, how the yare put out and what people need to do to make sure they're abiding by them. Either person want to take that?
MR. VINCENT: All right. Well, as we said, under certain low power or no power situations, when pressure is lost in water systems there is a possibility of infiltration into the water lines of outside water that might not be safe or there's possibility of some backflow.And as a precaution, we have asked the utilities to issue boiled water notices under those kind of conditions. That doesn't mean everyone has to boil their water. You can disinfect it. You can drink bottled water.But if you have the ability and boiling it is acceptable to you, you want to boil the water forgone minute. And that would kill any kind of pathogens that might have entered into the water .Typically we have not seen any pathogens in water from low pressure zones in Florida after these hurricanes, but the possibility exists. And it has occurred in other states and in other areas of the country, so we want to make sure that people take those precautions. It's very important to take the precautions after an event or during a zero water pressure incident that people be aware that they're going to have to take care of their own water supply for some time.
MR. STRIPLING: And that leads -- well, I mean, Think that that idea leads to what do citizens do.You know, we've described a lot of stuff like large utility regulations meeting each other and agency rules that are being followed.What is it that citizens can do or is there anything to kind of prepare or respond to events related to water in their area? Are there guidelines for that or do you guys have recommendations for the average citizens at home for those things?
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Well, they'll often get a preliminary notice when a hurricane is coming. Some also actually issue a (inaudible) well water notice to citizens about cautions they should take. It's not just how to treat water over and above what comes out of the sink and whether or not to fill up their bathtubs, whether or not to buy certain supplies,can goods or bottled water and so forth .I think just to interject this here, the worse thing that we saw happen was that we had a number of deaths, a very significant number of deaths as result of the hurricanes because people went out and bought generators and then hooked them up inside of their house or in their garage and ended up dying of carbon monoxide poisoning.
MR. STRIPLING: Sure.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: If you're going to go the generator route, be sure you know what you're doing and don't start the generators up inside enclosed spaces and so forth .I think we also had a few people who died from electrocution, touching downed power lines or making other mistakes along that nature. Some people wen tout that were my age or older and they started clearing and grubbing their yards and had a heart attack. In fact, we lost someone in our department,their father died that way after a hurricane in '.So you'll often see with hurricanes it's post hurricane where people are making mistakes. So Would warn you about that as well.For hurricanes, you know, listen to your radio,if it's still functioning, listen to the community leaders and others about precautions you should make, whether it's evacuation or putting, you know,boards on your windows and so forth. Those are the normal kinds of precautions that we've certainly gotten used to here in Florida.
MR. STRIPLING: And for intentional events, I guess just general awareness of their surroundings?
MR. VINCENT: Yeah, we've gotten a lot of state warning point calls. We do get calls from plant operators. We also get calls from citizens who are living near. In fact, a lot of utilities will go to their neighbors and say, we'd like you to be a third pair of eyes, if you see anything suspicious, give us a ring, let us know. That's always helpful to be involved in your community.And another thing I would do is these things cost money. I know everybody hates their rates togo up. But, you know, give your utility a fair hearing about their requests when it comes to areas of security or treatment for water quality. The cost of water is one of the least costly things in our society. For $ you can buy all the water you can possibly drink in your lifetime .Certainly it's a lot cheaper than bottled water, thousand to one ratio there.So read your annual consumer competence report.here's a water quality report that comes out from your utility. Keep it around so you have the phone number if the utility -- if you have a problem with pressure or if you see something, call your utility.You know, they're supposed to be there helping the customers. That's my advice on getting involved.
MR. VINCENT: You know, folks that are on private wells, of course, have to be the king of their castle and take care of their own private well. We have rules for setbacks and construction of those so that they tend to remain pollution free.But where you could see a problem with private wells is when they're inundated with flood water,whether you're near a stream or a river or near astor surge that covers the well head with water,you could very well introduce bacterial or other pathogens in there that could make you sick, so you want to be able to disinfect your well. You could look at our web site and see how to disinfect the well if you're on a private well.And we have testing ability at each county health department so that you could take a sample there. There's plenty of private labs in your yellow pages where you can do that as well. They're, you know, listed under laboratories,environmental, and there's a couple of state labs around in different cities of the state, Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, West Palm that you hand carry your own sample to.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Yeah, I think Bob makes a good point.When you look at some of these reports that come out from Consumer Disease Control about the number of disease outbreaks in the United States when they do their case studies, so many of them are from waters we do not regulate, extremely small water systems or private wells.And the inundation thing is important. I mean,the yellow pages have water testing companies as well. There's laboratories within the state of Florida that one can use. You know, we do recommend if you have an incident with your private well, the water testing itself is only what, 20$?
MR. VINCENT: Yeah, ten or twenty, depending on where you go.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Where you go.
MR. VINCENT: The bacteria test is something we do recommend for private well owners. The public water utilities have to test monthly for bacteria or quarterly if they're a certain type, a smaller type.But they have to routinely disinfect. Whereas,private well owners don't have disinfection.So once a year we recommend a conform bacteria test. And since nitrate is a fertilizer and something that's a chemical in sewage waste, you should also test for nitrate every year or two.It's mobile in the environment, and we've seen that in private wells in Florida. That's a cheap test too, ten or 20$ at a private lab or the state lab.
MR. STRIPLING: And that's taken us sort of from thievery smallest water systems up through the huge mammoth utilities that are impacted by these storms.To me at least as a lay person, water is certainly critical infrastructure in the state. It sounds like a lot has been done to secure it and respond to any threats there.Now it's good to note that historically we don't have all of these intentional threats happening that the procedures are in place to respond and deal with them.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Yeah. I used to joke that I'm not so worried about Os ama bin Laden affecting my water as my crazy teen-age son who him and his friends go outdone afternoon and decide to throw something into the water tower.So security, they've been doing it for years,but they do need a more holistic approach to security. It can come from a whole lot of different environments than just international tourist attack.The residual benefits is a heightened concern, and we're doing a much better job now. Hurricanes, the only silver lining is the fact that we are looking at security in a whole new way.
MR. STRIPLING: And I think that's a good note to tendon. Thank you to Bob Vincent and Van Hoofing,from two of the agencies that are helping making sure that our water system is safe. Thanks for joining us today.
MR. HOOFNAGLE: Thank you, Mitch.
MR. VINCENT: Thank you.
|
|
