On April 25, skin-burning water flowed from the tap in Spencer, Mass., sending 100 people to the hospital and forcing everyone else to avoid their faucets and hoses.
One week after the incident, investigators discovered that two city workers accidentally released an excessive amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, into the water system after they forgot to switch the feed system from manual to automatic.
Thirty-four gallons of sodium hydroxide entered the city’s water supply over a 12.5-hour period, from the night of April 24 to the morning of April 25.
In addition, an alarm system for alerting offsite workers to the situation wasn’t working properly, and no one was in the building to hear onsite alarms.
Though not an agroterrorism incident, the event shows how easy an attack on the water supply could be, said Robert Finch, emergency preparedness coordinator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency in Kentucky.
We all need to take more care in our environment and this article is just ONE of the things that happens and shows that our food supply should have a more robust protection system than is now in place.
