Like a lot of people, Potomac resident Guy Semmes enjoys walks along the C&O Canal. As a builder, Semmes enjoyed watching the last renovation of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission intake facility, about one mile upstream from Swain’s Lock.
“It’s a really wonderful thing,” Semmes said.
With the arrival of spring, Semmes began his regular jogs along the canal, but the first time he arrived at the intake facility, he was surprised by what he found there.
“They put this expensive, worthless barricade around the whole darn thing,” Semmes said.
The barricade is being called a “privacy fence” by WSSC. The gray metal barrier is solid and approximately eight feet tall. It completely encircles the intake portion of the facility.
“They’ve carefully tried to keep people out,” Semmes said.
WSSC put up the barrier in order safeguard the water supply, said Chuck Brown, a spokesman for the utility.
“I think it’s fairly clear that when it comes to the safety of the public water supply, we must take every reasonable precaution,” he said. “We’re sorry for any recreational inconvenience, but protecting the health and safety of our 1.6 million customers comes first.”
But how reasonable is this particular precaution? At eight feet high, the barrier would not be difficult to scale, Semmes said. “Anybody could easily get in there and do what they wanted to do,” he said.
He also pointed out that there is no barrier in the river itself. “You can come down the river in a canoe,” Semmes said.
It is also relatively easy to walk around to the upstream side of the intake pipe and have access to the water just before it goes into the intake. And the pipe which crosses the canal is another visible target.
Brown explained that there are other security precautions that have already been put into place, with more to come. “We are planning some additional security enhancements,” Brown said.
Semmes is also concerned that by increasing the security, it increases the interest in what is behind the fence. “The more they’re doing all this security, the more obvious the target is,” Semmes said.
But security measures such as this one are new to a country which is just starting to deal with the prospects of terrorism on U.S. soil.
“The first thing I can tell you is there is no handbook,” said Gary Felton, a professor at the University of Maryland. “We’re discovering things as they happen.” Felton’s expertise generally lies in the area of water quality, but recently, protecting the water supply has been coming up more and more often.
Before the barrier was erected, a person could stand over the intake and look directly at the water as it flowed into the pipes to go to be treated.
Felton points out that introducing a biological agent into the water supply is not likely to have much of an effect. Filtration plants, he said, are designed to remove biological toxins from water.
“For most of the poisons we’ve looked at, you’d need huge tanker trucks,” Felton said.
He does not however, wish to criticize the plant officials for taking precautions. These people, he notes, are trained to make water potable, not deal with attacks from terrorist teams. “They are trying a bunch of things. Some of them might not appear to make sense to us,” Felton said.
In a larger sense, Felton thinks that the nation needs to take a look at the security precautions we are taking — some of which may be haphazard and ineffective
“How much do we want to change our life?” Felton said. “We haven’t had a thoughtful approach.