Can We Protect our Drinking Water in an Age of Terror?

This year close to one million Americans will get sick from something in their water; about 1,000 of those ultimately result in fatalities, according the Center for Disease Control. These are the figures, without a terror intervention, how much more damage and death when there is a concerted effort to harm and kill people?

Water is vulnerable and not hard to contaminate. This last summer in North Carolina, 75,000 of our soldiers and their families were poisoned by drinking contaminated water on a military base using PCE, a dry cleaning agent readily available to anyone. This was not a terror attack, but why couldn't a terrorist duplicate this failure in our systems to harm Americans all over the country? The answer is, they could!

In his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush noted that captured Al Qaeda documents included detailed maps of several U.S. municipal public drinking water systems.

Apprehension regarding a terrorist assault on drinking water systems has also been reinforced by news reports and arrests of suspects charged with threatening to contaminate municipal water supplies in the U.S.

No matter how minor the contamination event or short-term the disruption to the delivery of safe drinking water, the psychological, medical and potential public health impact on the U.S. population could be significant.

for more:
[link to anewknighthood.blogspot.com]