When it comes to shellfish, count me in when they pass out the raw oysters - but you can keep those mussels, partner. I did try them once at this quaint little French restaurant in the old section of Montreal. I figured anything swimming in garlic and butter couldn't be all bad - I was wrong.
My contempt of the lowly mussel has reached new heights this week as I sit in my office contemplating the water Armageddon the Atlanta metro area will soon face. You see, we are in what the experts are calling the "drought of the century" here in north Georgia. Nobody had to tell me, since my backyard looks like one of those vintage black-and-white photos of the 1930's Oklahoma Dust Bowl.
The issue here is that some sort of endangered striped mussel located down-river in the Florida panhandle is suffering from our drought too. Apparently, not enough water is making it down stream to keep their tiny backs moist. So the Army Corps of Engineers, working under an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) directive to protect this endangered mussel, is siphoning off close to 800 bathtubs full of water every minute from Lake Lanier, the biggest lake in Georgia and the main water supply to more than four million people.
Always planning ahead, I have begun to recycle used Rolling Rock beer bottles, filling them with tap water and storing them in the cool of the basement to build our personal water stock. I'm also getting my wife and daughter acclimated to life without water by having them bathe with baby wipes at least three times a week. On her own initiative, my wife has begun to launder my dress shirts in the swimming pool out back, beating them dry on my new Big Green Egg Smoker. It's not that bad, except on hot days the perspiration mixes with the chlorine residue in the shirts, making me smell like an off-duty lifeguard.
The impending water crisis here in the ATL is driving home the point of just how precious this resource is. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, we have all been concerned about how susceptible the country's water distribution system is to terrorist attacks. The majority of the nation's water infrastructure is ancient and was not built to withstand or deter terrorism.
The EPA, along with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) has worked to establish some sort of standard for protecting the nation's water supply from attack, releasing the first water security and protection guidelines for use by water and wastewater utilities earlier this year. This three-phase program is designed to combat threats like chemical and biological contamination, physical attack and disruption of the computerized network Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system that is the control center of the country's critical infrastructure grid.
In March of this year, the EPA launched the Water Security (WS) initiative to address the risk of intentional contamination of drinking water systems in a response to HSPD-9. The agency asked for all solutions that are able to provide contamination warning systems that also address specified monitoring and surveillance components be submitted for immediate evaluation, with the government funding up to 80 percent of the total project cost.
The sheer scope of water distribution and reservoirs in the United States makes it almost impossible to ensure a foolproof solution. But as I face a winter without water in my neighborhood, the impact of a compromised water supply is very real and frightening.
If you have any questions or comments for Steve Lasky regarding this or any other security industry-related issue, please e-mail him at [email protected].
Steve Lasky | Editorial Director, Editor-in-Chief/Security Technology Executive
Steve Lasky is Editorial Director of the Endeavor Business Media Security Group, which includes SecurityInfoWatch.com, as well as Security Business, Security Technology Executive, and Locksmith Ledger magazines. He is also the host of the SecurityDNA podcast series. Reach him at [email protected].
