The Water Resources Act 1991 allows for a prison sentence of up to two years (and/or a hefty fine) for ‘polluting controlled waters’.

As far as I know, no-one from any of the big water companies has been imprisoned for this, though bosses of small businesses certainly have been.

The Environment Agency once bizarrely prosecuted itself (sort of) under the Act.

There should be laws about this kind of thing … oh, wait …

But wait! I saw it in a movie… Ask Batman. -There is no supervillain called “The Arsonist”…

I’m a paid-on-call municipal firefighter in a moderately-sized Wisconsin town (8,000 people). My department covers not just our city but about a hundred square miles of surrounding urban/rural interface. That’s a fancy way of saying that we deal with a lot of space where farm fields and forests start turning into suburban housing developments. We have urban areas with full hydrant coverage, interface areas with partial coverage, and rural areas where there ain’t no hydrants for a million billion miles.

We draw water from our hydrant system at our drills at least once and usually twice per month– we train at multiple locations per drill night, and in different general areas whenever possible. This is not just to keep us familiar with the art of hydrant hookups, it’s to spot check that the water system is working as intended for us. Our city water department works hand-in-hand with our chief, and any expected shutdown or decrease in pressure at any point in the network is brought to our immediate attention, just as we call them the moment we break something or find a malfunctioning hydrant.

What I mean to illustrate by all of the above is that we are intimately aware, at all times, of what the hydrant state is supposed to be in any area under our jurisdiction. We know whether we can expect to get our water supply on-scene or whether we have to haul more of it with us.

For rural areas where a hydrant water supply cannot be assured, we maintain two dedicated water supply trucks (call them “tankers” or “tenders” depending on which lingo your area prefers) carrying about 3000 gallons apiece. The idea is that these trucks will go to the scene, drop large collapsible tanks, fill those tanks with their onboard water, and then rush off to refill– creating a “water shuttle” system that replaces, as best possible, the nonexistent hydrants.

We also take pains to map and survey any possible body of water large enough to serve as a potential supply– ponds, creeks, lakes, rivers, wells. We have equipment that can draft from just about any such body of water into a tanker, or even draft directly into the water pump of an on-scene engine if the supply is close enough to the fire scene (say, within 2-300 feet).

The use of tankers/tenders is not some new or limited idea; it’s a standard procedure from coast to coast and has been for decades. And the more I’ve typed here, the more I’ve come to think that something is goofy with the situation, and it might not just be the hydrants. If the department responsible for the burning house knew that there was no hydrant supply to the area, where were its tankers? What efforts were made to get alternate water supplies to the scene? That’s important information for evaluating the overall situation.

Furthermore, in the interest of total fairness, I should say that perhaps those efforts were indeed made– perhaps those tankers were rolling as soon as possible, and the location of the house was just too far out from the responding station(s) for control of the fire to be established.

The unfortunate fact of life in any fire jurisdiction with a lot of rural area is that some people just plain live too far out to expect much if their fire is serious!

I have been on calls with a travel time of more than 20-25 minutes at 55+ MPH; and remember, even before getting on the road it would have taken at least five minutes for us to get paged, get to the station, and get the trucks rolling. And even -that- counts from the time the fire is noticed and reported, not from the time it actually started.

If this fire victim lived far enough out in the sticks, he may (understandably) be grasping at the hydrant issue in grief and anger. But it might also be a case where geography is the major villain rather than any human agency, and the hydrants, useless as they were, are not the key.

Rockwall is directly to the east of Dallas – one county over. It’s directly adjacent to a large water reservoir lake. Thus, the irony.

The attacker would remove the cover thingy on the hydrant, attach the device, then open the valve to expose the water. The device, being sealed, would allow no water to flow out. The device would then be triggered to introduce the adulterant into the system.

If a large volume of adulterant were necessary a small air compressor could be used to pressurize a larger container connected by hose to the delivery adapter.

I’m sure you could assemble such a device almost completely from hardware store parts, probably for under $100 for a simple dye injector. A high volume system would cost more because of the requirement for a compressor with sufficient PSI capacity (exceeding 150PSI at a reasonable flow rate will take a fairly substantial, though still consumer-grade, compressor. In this case one of those big floor-standing compressor tanks could serve as both the reservoir for the adulterant as well as the compressor tank).

You could bypass all the DIY stuff simply buy a surplus firetruck (A FOAF did this, got to ride in it myself) for ~$5000 and just hook it backwards and pump hundreds of gallons of whatever you want into the system.

DEMO BURN BY VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT
……………………………………………………
“Well, they got the crowd settled down and the children
rounded up, and then threw in some more kindling,
added fuel to it, lined up the fire hoses to the
hydrants, adjusted their new red fire helmets, and
then ignited the mess and set it aflame…
And the large wrench broke off on the hydrant’s
release bolt.  It broke off right near the gripping
jaws, rendering it useless.  Of course, wouldn’t you
know, it was the only large industrial wrench they had
with them.  Men went running to the mill and to the
firehouse to fetch another, but the flames did not
wait for them…
…………………………………….

And that is how the 1937 Toledo Volunteer Fire
Department burnt down all the buildings and businesses
on the Toledo waterfront.”

(ty bardfinn for the acronym

One minor correction. The way I read the original story, I don’t think anyone died in the fire. The homeowner said “My grandfather died last year. My wife’s grandfather died last year. All our pictures were the biggest thing that we lost”. The way I read that, the grandparents died sometime before the fire.

I suspect you’d kill a lot more people if you just started some fires.

What the hell?

I live in NYC, where we actually did get a terrorist attack a few years back. But my folks live out West, and something that throws me every time I visit is:

For some reason that completely escapes me, people in small towns get really insulted if you imply that where they live would be of no interest to terrorists. “We’re only 20 miles from a dam!!! There’s an abandoned military installation three counties over!!! And we’ve got the biggest grain silo in the state!!!” If you press the point, they’ll call your mom later and tell her that you’ve got too big for your britches living out East.

Isn’t this making terrorism easier? Instead of the handful of people out there who would be creative and clever enough to figure out a way, and get ahold of toxins in order to, poison our water supply we’ve suddenly given any wanna-be terrorist the ability to destroy an entire neighborhood with a lit match?

I can see the local news report: Half a city destroyed when a small brush fire near a local home surged out of control. Arson suspected as a submitted terrorist video shows them starting the fire; but thank God our water supply is safe!

I suspect you’d kill a lot more people if you just started some fires.

Which is all the more ironic because someone is far more likely to think of doing that than to try to poison the water supply through a hydrant.

Seriously… sit down and try to think of ways to sow havoc in a populated regoin. Tell me you don’t think “set lots of fires” before you think “contrived poisoning attempt through the fire hydrants”.

The fires are a lot less expensive, too.

Only there to flush out their systems? What kind of systems would these be? Hmmmm… Maybe… FIRE-FIGHTING systems? Have you ever seen the word hydrant associated with any other word but fire? Yes they’re FIRE hydrants… …but they’re only there to “help flush out and clean their systems…”

(*head explodes*)