Break-In at Water Plant in Oxnard Went Unreported

Oxnard officials failed to notify police or to tighten security for 10 days after an intruder cut open an entry gate at a city water station on Oct. 8, authorities confirmed Thursday.

It was not until Oct. 18 that a city water manager, and an employee frustrated that the manager had not filed a report immediately, separately told police that a chain securing a water station perimeter gate in south Oxnard had been cut, two locks removed and the gate slid open.

City officials still have not notified the FBI, local emergency officials or county health officers about the intrusion, because they said there was no reason to believe the water system was contaminated or compromised.

Locks that would have shown a breach of the city’s wells and water system were left untouched, and alarms that would have blared were never activated, they said.

Still, city officials said Thursday that they have tightened security at all four city water pumping and blending stations during the last week, and that a water manager should have notified police of the intrusion much sooner.

“Especially in light of the situations all over the world, I think we need to err on the side of caution,” said Karen Burnham, assistant city manager. “[Now] there will be an immediate response in terms of contact with the police.

“I’d rather somebody say, ‘You know, this may not be anything, but I’m reporting it,’ rather than say, ‘You know, this happened last week,’ ” Burnham said.

Police patrols have been increased at water facilities, and the city water division is checking the stations around the clock seven days a week, she said.

“We have security measures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” she said.

Granville Bowman, city public works director, said he thought the incident had been reported immediately by a water division manager. But he said he saw no reason to alert the FBI or county emergency officials.

“It’s a far cry from a fence lock being broken to a water system itself being compromised,” he said.

A memo by police Sgt. Dan Christian also indicates that the water manager who finally reported the incident, Juan Moreno, was also concerned that the public might overreact. “They did not want to add to the overblown concerns of some of the citizenry, due to the events since Sept. 11, 2001,” Christian wrote.

As Moreno was reporting the incident to police Oct. 18, employee David Birch, a pumping plant operator who discovered the intrusion 10 days before, filed a complaint with a different police officer because Moreno had not followed up on pledges to promptly report the incident.

Birch said he was concerned that terrorists could have cut the entry gate, and that his employee union urged him to file a complaint himself.

“My concern is that these two wells can access the [ground water] aquifer,” Birch said. “And I’d heard these reports on the radio saying that we should be protecting the aquifers and reservoirs. . . .There was a security breach, and I didn’t understand why we weren’t reporting it.”

But Birch said he saw no indications that the intruder had tampered with the station’s two wells, water-blending machines or equipment sheds on the station parcel near Oxnard’s Five Points area.

Granville said both wells are being abandoned and that an intruder would have had to remove a huge pumping apparatus to gain access to the long tubes that draw water from a subterranean basin.

Had the water system been compromised, “we would have known,” Granville said.

Representatives of the FBI and the county public health and emergency services agencies said they were not concerned that Oxnard officials failed to notify them. But they emphasized that they would have wanted to know about the incident if police had deemed it a credible security threat.

“That’s something we would want to log in the information we are collecting for our intelligence unit,” said Laura Hernandez, assistant director of the county’s Office of Emergencies Services.

Dr. Robert Levin, the county’s top public health officer, said the information would have been important to the county’s Terrorism Working Group if the threat had appeared real.

“This is the kind of thing that should have gone to the group,” Levin said.

And FBI spokeswoman Cheryl Mimura said, “If there was a threat, we would like them to notify us.”

None of the officials questioned Oxnard’s decision not to call bioterrorism experts to test for lethal spores because there was no indication of a larger problem.

Oxnard police officials said they did not think the break-in was a serious attempt to contaminate the city’s water supply.

“To use an analogy, if someone were trying to break into Ft. Knox, they didn’t even get close,” police spokesman David Keith said.

Police Chief Art Lopez accepted the findings of water supervisor Moreno and conducted no further investigation, Keith said.

“We had a meeting with the FBI last week on how to deal with this kind of situation when there is a credible threat,” he said. “In our view, this was not a credible threat and we will not lend to this hysteria.”