In light of the resent unrest in my hometown I have been more curious about our nation's infrastructure. For instance, what if the few hundred hoodrats who fought the Baltimore Police Department to a standstill and looted over 200 business and set over 150 fires, targeted local utilities instead? What would that be like? A friend of mine works for a rural water utility. Below are some notes and observations he gave me to post on the site.
I have about 30 years experience: 15 in water, 15 in wastewater.
We have 3 operators on call for 6,000 customers, serving about 14,000 men, women and children.
There are 6 total DRC for on call operators, DRC is acronym for Direct Responsible Charge, our schedule is 8/6 rotation. We are licensed by the state at different levels. I'm grade 4 water treatment, grade 4 water distribution, grade 3 wastewater treatment. We have to complete 30 credit hours of CEUs to keep our certification. This is over a three year renewal. CEU is continuing education units. If you screw up big time they take your certification and you are out of a job.
I just finished my 8 day on call marathon, with a 24 hour binge starting on Monday morning and ending today at noon. We had a power outage. A dumbass drove a boom truck under a power line. Because the power systems are at full throttle any outage forces other grids to pick up the slack. It causes what I call a cascade effect. We experience immediate power drops as the system tries to compensate. If you are a water operator it kicks out the motors running the water distribution system so they don't single phase, burning them up.
I was thinking about the e-mail I sent you about a nationwide outage, one truck, affected half the county for 24hrs. This also burns out the small components of our SCADA system, which created the nightmare: 2 lone operators; 2 rednecks overseeing water sources for 14,000 people, kind of funny don't you think?
Based on the fact that the police departments and political leadership of Baltimore City and Baltimore County, simultaneously declined to protect the citizenry, and devoted all assets to protecting key government officials and buildings and upscale residential enclaves, I consider it likely that real terrorists, if they really exist in the virulent numbers we are led to believe, might take such events in the future as cues to attack utilities, which would go a long way towards expanding your own personal Boned Zone if you happened to live in the affected area.
Relevant Links
link › en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
