Towns on Alert to Protect Water Supplies

Every day, Eugene Pettet walks the mossy banks of Mink Hollow Stream and Cooper Lake doing his job -- checking water levels, adjusting valves, watching for trespassers.

It’s an idyllic workplace, and Pettet has spent 30 years here, living in the same lakeshore home where his wife, the last caretaker’s daughter, grew up.

But these days, Pettet fears that even his quiet lake with its occasional loon could be a target for terrorists, attracted by a billion gallons of pristine mountain water waiting to be pumped to the faucets of the city of Kingston a dozen miles east.

No longer do big road signs declare the lake and the stream property of the city’s water department. They were put away.

“We changed all the locks” -- to the fences, the sheds, everything, Pettet said.

In an age when all the nation’s communities are worried about terrorism, water is not a spectacular target compared with a nuclear plant or a skyscraper. But it’s everywhere. And every town depends on it.

“If you want to instill fear in America, hit a rural area,” said Judy Hansen, who has run Kingston’s water department for 20 years. “All water utilities, even the small trailer parks, are taking this seriously.”

So is the federal government, which has ordered each water utility to assess its vulnerability to terrorist attack and ways to protect it. The Environmental Protection Agency has put together millions of dollars in grants and training programs, with more promised.

Water, however, presents a special puzzle to those trying to protect the nation.

Experts say that although water shouldn’t be ignored, it’s not the easiest target. Reservoirs are so huge, they are hard to poison. Quality checks and purification should detect and block chemical or biological attacks. Bombs could shut down pumping stations, but probably wouldn’t leave many casualties.

On the other hand, water is incredibly hard to protect because of those huge reservoirs, miles of distribution systems, access points on every street, home and business. And everyone depends on it for life.

“How are you going to protect every single fire hydrant out there?” said Greg Evans, director of the Center for the Study of Bioterrorism and Emerging Diseases at St. Louis University. Quick response -- rather than blanket protection -- is the way to prepare, he said.

Still, the concern about water is real. President Bush underscored that when he kicked off his campaign for a homeland security agency at a Kansas City water treatment facility that was protected by a rusty chain-link fence next to a busy city street.

Last summer, the EPA began providing $53 million in grants to water systems to assess their vulnerability and come up with emergency response plans, beginning with those serving more than 100,000 people. By the end of 2004, smaller utilities must do so too, including Kingston, population 25,000.

For starters, officials should review personnel background checks, computer security, access to pump stations and water sources, and the safety of chlorine used to treat water, the EPA said.

“There’s always imponderables,” said Tracy Mehan, EPA’s assistant administrator for water. “You develop security options to deal with some threats, and then creative, evil people come up with other avenues of attack.”

At the same time, the EPA has begun studies to improve detection and analysis of potential chemical or biological threats in drinking water, and the best ways to make plants and pipes harder to damage.

The Bush administration’s budget, still being debated in Washington, includes $22 million to help water utilities with training and technical assistance.

Water utilities complain that that doesn’t go far enough because it only pays for part of the cost of studies and reports -- not the actual improvements. If the government is serious about protecting water, it needs to provide more money, they say.

The American Water Works Assn., a group that represents 80% of the nation’s water utilities, estimates that at least $1.5 billion is needed nationwide for the most basic steps, and several billion more for extensive improvements.

The first $115,000 vulnerability assessment grant went to a suburban Maryland water commission, although safety improvements there could reach $100 million, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission estimated.

Kingston, on the west bank of the Hudson River some 110 miles north of New York City, pumps 3.5 million gallons of water each day.

Emergency management and law enforcement officials here and in surrounding Ulster County worry not just about supplies for the city, a onetime capital of the state, but for scores of small towns across the craggy Catskill Mountains nearby.

The county is also home to much of New York City’s massive network of drinking water reservoirs. Sept. 11 brought armed guards and road closures.

In the county’s 1,100 square miles, at least 50% is watershed -- where streams form or groundwater collects -- for someone’s drinking water, said Art Snyder, the county’s emergency management director.

“It’s not something you can protect like a building. You can’t lock all the doors and set up barricades,” he said. “There’s hundreds of miles of shoreline.”

Mink Hollow Stream collects runoff from the steep Catskill slopes, its gurgling waters home to coveted brook and brown trout. An old stone weir diverts water to a grate, where a hand-cranked wheel in a locked shed controls the flow.

The water runs through cast iron pipes to Cooper Lake. Gravity takes out much of the silt and carries the water through more pipes down to the treatment plant, where it’s filtered through sand and anthracite, and disinfected with chlorine.

From the treatment plant, gravity takes the water into another reservoir, where it runs to more than 8,000 service connections and 900 hydrants in Kingston.

In all, security improvements are likely to cost $2 million, Hansen said, while the annual water budget runs $2.5 million. These costs will wind up on the bills of the city’s water users unless the federal government helps.

Locks, fences, cameras and more watchfulness are the first improvements being considered as Kingston looks to protect its supplies. Other steps “you wouldn’t see,” Snyder said. The vulnerability assessment itself, like studies that the county has done on how to respond to other terrorist attacks, won’t be public either.

These reports are kept in draft form because they’re always changing -- and also because that means they’re not subject to state Freedom of Information laws, Snyder said.

“We’re trying to give the public confidence; we are focused on it,” Snyder said. “But we also don’t want to make it public so people who want to do harm can circumvent it.”

Upstairs in the 103-year-old water plant, where high school students still take their annual tour, a 10-foot-wide American flag covers most of one wall.

That went up a few days after Sept. 11. It covers a detailed map of the city’s water system.

Out at the lake and stream, Pettet, with a walkie-talkie hanging from his overalls, will continue his patrols. It’s not high-tech, but it works.

“Vigilance is the big thing up here,” Hansen said. “He’s our eyes and ears here, literally.”