Ten Ways to Protect Your Water Supply System from Threats

1. Prepare or update an emergency-response plan. Make sure all employees help to create it and receive training on the plan.
2. Post updated emergency 24-hour numbers at your facilities in highly visible areas (pumphouse door, vehicles, office) and give them to key personnel and local response officials.
3. Get to know your local police and ask them to add your facilities to their routine rounds. Prepare and practice emergency response activities with public health officials.
4. Fence and lock your drinking water facilities and vulnerable areas (e.g., wellhead, hydrants, manholes, pumphouse, and storage tanks).
5. Lock all entry gates and doors and set alarms to indicate illegal entry. Do not leave keys in equipment or vehicles at any time.
6. Install good lighting around your pumphouse, treatment facility and parking lot.
7. Identify existing and alternate water supplies and maximize use of backflow prevention devices and interconnections.
8. Use your Source Water Assessment (a study and report compiled each year that is specific to each water system providing basic information about the water used to provide drinking water) information to work with any businesses and homeowners that are listed as potential sources of contamination and lesson their threat to your sources.
9. Lock monitoring wells (temporary wells used for sample collection) to prevent vandals or terrorists from pouring contaminants directly into ground water near your source. Prevent pouring or siphoning contaminants through vent pipes by moving them inside the pumphouse or treatment plants, or if that isn’t possible, fencing or screening them.
10. In case of an emergency, first call 911, then follow your emergency response plan.

Key Questions to Consider About Security Measures

Before deciding on a particular security measure, consider these questions. The answers can help you determine the benefits, liabilities, and cost implications, which are key to the security planning and decision-making process. Security measures can be business practices, system upgrades, or security improvements.

• What security measures does your system already have in place?
• Are your current security measures working properly? Are they regularly tested, repaired, or adjusted?
• Will the measure help prevent, detect, or delay an event? What are its recommended uses? Will it solve your system’s particular needs?
• Will the measure increase your ability to respond to an event?
• What does it cost to purchase, run, maintain, and replace it? What will these costs be over time?
• What kind of maintenance is required? How often?
• Are specialized maintenance or repair skills required? What are they?
• Can system staff members maintain it or do you need external expertise?
• What type of monitoring is required? How Often? (What if an alarm goes off and no one knows?)
• What are the operating requirements? How many employees? How much time? Electricity? Batteries?
• How much training is required to implement, use, or follow the measure?
• Will unrelated events interfere with its effectiveness? (For example, will a stray animal set off a detection system?)
• What is the useful life expectancy?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the measure?
• What impact will the security measure have on normal operations and maintenance? (Will it drain scarce resources?)

Preparing for the Unexpected: Security for Small Water Systems, developed by The National Environmental Training Center for Small Communities.