Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
Houston Chronicle
Copyright 2001
Thursday, October 11, 2001
NEWS
$5 billion sought to protect water / 'Worst-case scenario' sends group to
Congress to plead for funding
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Worried about terrorism, the nation's water system
operators want $5 billion from Congress to protect drinking water and
wastewater plants.
They also want $155 million - a 62-fold increase - from the
Environmental Protection Agency for security planning.
The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, which serves 160
million people, is asking the government to boost security for water
supplies. The request was being made Wednesday to a House
subcommittee.
"The unprecedented events of September 11 obviously brought a
sense of urgency, as the term 'worst-case scenario' took on new
meaning for the water industry," John Sullivan, the group's president
and chief engineer for the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, said in
written testimony.
A bipartisan group of 11 senators on the Environment and Public
Works Committee sent Senate leaders a letter Tuesday also proposing
the $5 billion among other billions of dollars in spending to boost
U.S. security and to help revive the ailing economy further weakened
by the four hijackings in September.
Wednesday's hearing was called to explore the vulnerability of
water supplies at dams and reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants,
hazardous chemical operations and federally owned power plants.
Some major fears extending far beyond New York and Washington are
that an explosion at a sewage plant along a river could contaminate
the drinking water of millions downstream or that the catastrophic
loss of major dams could wreak havoc on cities in the flow's path.
"The safety and security of the water infrastructure has not been
a high priority in the past," Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., the
subcommittee's chairman, said in an interview. "We hope to get some
of the cities and water agencies to look more seriously at this."
However, he added, "Even if we spent the entire federal budget on
security, we still couldn't make the country 100 percent safe from
every danger or every nut that's out there. We want to do what we
should be doing, but we don't want to do things that are totally
unnecessary."
In a 1998 presidential directive by President Clinton, the EPA
gained responsibility for protecting the nation's water supply from
terrorist attack, including biological contamination.
The agency received $2.5 million to combat bioterrorism this year.
Before that, it received as little as $10,000 to protect water
supply infrastructure in 1998, no funding for that purpose in 1999
and $100,000 in 2000 - money that mostly went toward assessing
vulnerability and conducting a water protection workshop, according
to EPA figures.
Sullivan's group says the EPA could use $100 million more to
assess the vulnerability of the nation's largest water supply systems
and $55 million more to improve an emergency response plan, developed
mainly to handle natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes and
accidents such as hazardous waste spills.
Patrick Karney, a spokesman for the Association of Metropolitan
Sewerage Agencies, said in written testimony that the terror attacks
"revealed how little our industry knows about the unique risks posed
by terrorist threats."