Fragility Of Water Systems

Water On February 8th officials from Pinellas County in Florida announced that an unidentified hacker remotely gained access to a panel that controls the City of Oldsmar's water treatment system. The hacker changed a setting that would have drastically increased the amount of sodium hydroxide in the water supply. This would have, in effect, poisoned the water system. “The city’s water supply was not affected,” The Tampa Bay Times reported. “A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they’ve disabled the remote-access system used in the attack.” In short, a likely inexperienced intruder somehow learned the credentials needed to remotely access Oldsmar’s water system, did little to hide his activity, and then tried to change settings by such a wide margin that the alterations would be hard to overlook. This story does give an example of how some real terrorism can be done. It also emphasized to me why I need water storage. There are approximately 54,000 distinct drinking water systems in the United States. The vast majority of those systems serve fewer than 50,000 residents, with many serving just a few hundred or thousand. Virtually all of them rely on some type of remote access to monitor and/or administer these facilities. Many of these facilities are unattended, underfunded, and do not have someone watching the IT operations 24/7. Many facilities have not separated operational technology (the bits that control the switches and levers) from safety systems that might detect and alert on intrusions or potentially dangerous changes. Water is one of the easiest and most economic part of preparation that there is. Buying bottled water is pretty cheap. Or, saving juice containers or soda pop containers and filling them is quite economic. After reading the story above about Florida I decided to change out my water storage. I actually started this as I was moving from an old shed into a newly built storage shed. This weekend I will finish by replacing, and retreating, our barrels and the single 400 gallon tank that we have. We try to not waste the water and we water our garden with it. I also am going to look at our filter situation. I will get all of our water filters together and determine what may need to be replaced. Water is one of the most important things to have in an emergency. I used to follow the “one gallon, per person, per day” standard. Several years ago I talked to an emergency worker who worked in Haiti in 2010 after their bad earthquake. He said that the “one gallon” rule did not really apply there in Haiti. He would recommend 2 gallons, per person, per day. I changed to that several years ago in my storage. One gallon is enough, but I like the option of more. Take a look at your filters. Most filters will last a life time if they’re not used, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. You can test them if you like but if they are in good physical shape they’re probably fine. I just want to know how many total gallons we can filter with what we have. I also take it as a good time to test hooking our generator to our well to see how that works. Politicians like to never let a catastrophe got to waste, well I feel the same way. When problems happen in other parts of the country or world I take it as a sign to check what I have in place. Prepare today for tomorrow. It’s always better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. Semper Paratus Check 6 Burn