That’s why nobody blinked last week when the Augusta Commission approved a plan to spend $3.2 million over six years to defend the city’s fire hydrants from terrorist attack.

Seriously.

Two new employees will be hired exclusively to retrofit the hydrants with something called the Davidson Anti-Terrorism Valve, designed to keep foreign substances — anthrax, bubonic plague, cyanide, tennis balls — from entering the water supply.

 

There’s no evidence of such a threat, mind you, but Utilities Director Max Hicks decided the Davidson ATV was a good buy. “They are necessary to protect the system,” he says.

The “stealth” valve was invented in the 1970s by a Sunnyside, Ga., contractor, Tom Davidson, who wanted to keep juvenile delinquents from throwing rocks and bottles into the hydrants. No one wanted it then. He sat on the idea for years, not even bothering to file for a patent.

 

After 9/11, Davidson had an epiphany: If teenage punks could infiltrate the water supply, a terrorist could poison a city through its fire hydrants.

Suddenly, a business opportunity beckoned. Retired Georgia businessman D. Michael Walden signed on to market the device. Atlanta agreed to begin installing it citywide in 2005.

 

Today the Davidson ATV is distributed in the southeastern United States by Mainline Homeland Security Products and Services, a company ultimately controlled by Code Hennessy & Simmons, a $2.5 billion private equity firm based in Chicago.

CHS acquired Mainline this January, smelling guaranteed profits. Terrorism, and the fear of it, aren’t about to go away. Neither is water.

 

Estimates of the number of hydrants in the U.S. range from “a whole lot to a whole, whole, whole lot,” says Michael Green, president of Mainline Homeland Security. He landed the Augusta contract. “You’re talking 100 million hydrants, probably.”

“You can kinda do the math,” Green says.

OK, let’s. To encourage other cities to follow its lead, Green gave Augusta a low introductory price of $575 per hydrant. Assuming 100 million units at $600 per, it might cost $60 billion to remove America’s fire hydrants from Al Qaeda’s supposed target list.

 
Some perspective: The total budget of the Homeland Security Department is $42.8 billion this year. FEMA, the agency that responds to disasters like Hurricane Katrina, accounts for less than $3 billion of that.

Even if Mainline merely tackled the 3 million or so hydrants in Georgia, that would still be $1.8 billion. Not bad, considering the parent company, Mainline Supply, now claims $200 million in sales.

The enormous expense required to defend our nation’s fire hydrants, and with them our precious bodily fluids, begs the question: Does this make any sense whatsoever?

 

“We have received no threats against the water supply at all, particularly here in Augusta,” says FBI Agent Ed Reinhold, who runs the bureau’s local office.

 

What about other terrorist threats? “We’ve received no threats concerning the Augusta area,” Reinhold says. “Are there some targets here that might be of interest? Yes,” the agent adds, citing the Savannah River Site and the intelligence center at Fort Gordon.

 

“Have we received any credible information? No.”

 

Credibility? Since when does that matter?

 

***

“Given that most if not all airmen … drink water every day, an adversary could functionally destroy or disrupt USAF operations by injecting deadly chemicals or insidious infective agents into an air base water supply.”

— 1999 Air Force report on water security (emphasis added)

Water supplies have always been vulnerable. Confederate troops slowed Sherman’s march, though obviously not enough, by fouling the water with slaughtered animals. Since the U.S. invasion, Iraqi insurgents have routinely sabotaged Baghdad’s infrastructure, including water pipes.

After 9/11, when anthrax was still going through the mail, American cities began guarding their reservoirs. A December 2001 Wall Street Journal report highlighted another vulnerability, well-known to plumbers: backflow.

 

That’s when the water reverses course in the pipes because of a change in pressure. Backflow is why, when you wash your car, you’re not supposed to leave the hose in a bucket of soapy water — or botulism toxin.

Backflow can occur just about anywhere on a water system. But Mainline contends that fire hydrants are the system’s greatest weakness.

 

“Every time a pesticide truck hooks up to a fire hydrant to flush out, it could just as easily be pumping something in,” says Green.

Augusta requires that new buildings install backflow-prevention devices. Many existing buildings have yet to be retrofitted. That means any home or office could be as great a potential threat to national security as a fire hydrant.

 

You read that right. No place is safe.

 

The hydrant-protection squad prefers to downplay this. Green maintains that to create a deadly backflow out of a house, a terrorist would first have to rent the place, thus leaving a footprint. “For a hydrant,” he adds, “you don’t need any other equipment other than a $5 wrench.”

 

And, of course, a mastery of hydraulics.

 

And — oh yeah — the poison.

Besides, doesn’t water usually come out of a fire hydrant?

 

Green is reluctant to describe the exact process by which a terrorist might introduce toxins through a hydrant, but the company does provide demonstrations for officials. Green says they’ve approached some 300 communities in the Southeast.

 

The Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police was concerned enough to pass a resolution in May 2006 calling for the protection of the water supply.

After hearing Mainline’s pitch, Augusta’s utilities department came to agree that fire hydrants were a gaping hole in our national defense. “We liked this particular product,” says Wes Byne, Augusta’s head of engineering. “We’re trying to shore up things that are high probability — that seem to make sense to us.”

In the next year, the city will spend $500,000 on hydrant protection, of which $150,000 is guaranteed to go toward Davidson ATVs.

“We really commend Augusta for taking a step forward here,” Green says. Atlanta is installing the Davidson ATV in all 19,000 of its hydrants, he says. Los Angeles has begun a pilot program. Knoxville, Tenn., has equipped 10 hydrants with the device.

Though federal Homeland Security grants could help protect hydrants, so far the burden has fallen to local utility customers. D. Michael Walden, who markets the valves, says some communities have gone so far as to adopt a monthly security tax of $1 per meter.

Mainline’s Web site lists 17 cities and counties that have installed the Davidson ATV. Augusta already is on the list, though the funding was just approved last week.

The company says every customer has been satisfied.

“We really try not to advertise how it works, other than that it works,” Green says.

 

***

“The United States cannot afford monitoring or treatment technologies that are solely focused on low-probability, high-consequence threats to our water systems.”
— Post-9/11 conclusion of Sandia National Laboratories, a government research center run by Lockheed Martin

Now, you might imagine that a hardcore terrorist bent on poisoning the citizens of Knoxville would be able to avoid the 10 Davidson-hardened hydrants there. Or, six years from now, when Augusta’s hydrants are secure, he might simply drive to Martinez. Or Athens. Or Savannah. Or North Augusta.

This is assuming, of course, that the (theoretical) terrorist really wanted to strike a mid-size city in the southeastern U.S. — as opposed to New York, Washington, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas or even London, Madrid or Bali.

Seriously. On the scale of potential terrorist threats, what is the risk of a chemical or biological attack on the water supply of Augusta, Ga., through its fire hydrants?

“I would say it’s immeasurably low. You can’t go below zero, right? It’s preposterously low,” says John Mueller of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University. Mueller is the author of “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.”

The book asks why, in the years since 9/11, America had not suffered another terrorist attack. Mueller argues that the threat of terrorism, though real, is much smaller than it has been made to seem by politicians and security contractors, for whom insecurity is the safest investment.

“International terrorism generally kills a few hundred people a year worldwide — not much more, usually, than the number who drown yearly in bathtubs in the United States,” Mueller writes. (Despite calls to train an elite corps of Federal Bathtub Marshals, our national lavatory-defense plans remain woefully inadequate.) “Americans worry intensely about ‘another 9/11,’ but if one of these were to occur every three months for the next five years, the chance of being killed in one of them is 0.02 percent.”

Contaminating the water supply is not as easy as the Davidson ATV guys make it sound. Certainly, they’re selling both fear and its prepackaged palliative. A Web site for the valve features a picture of the burning World Trade Center. “September 11th changed everything,” it says. “Is your water safe?”

The company claims a 2004 government report identified fire hydrants as “a top vulnerability.” Actually, the report in question mentions hydrants once, emphasizing other points in the distribution system, such as public buildings.

“If you want to kill people,” Mueller points out, “it’s infinitely less efficient than what that lunatic did at Virginia Tech.”

Chief among the difficulties faced by a wannabe hydro-terrorist is procuring, transporting and delivering sufficient quantities of deadly poison, whether chemical or biological. These days you can barely fertilize your lawn without the authorities finding out.

Think about it. Do you know where to get 130 tons of sodium cyanide, without anyone noticing? Based on the U.S. Air Force’s estimates, that’s how much it would take to spread a lethal dose through the 125 million gallons of water in Augusta’s reservoirs.

Granted, an attack closer to the faucet would take much less poison. But still. Seriously.
“It’s very difficult to get to the point where it would be lethal,” Mueller says. “It may be close to impossible to cause a big problem.”

In the highly unlikely event of an attack on the water supply, some unlucky people would probably get sick first, giving everyone else ample warning. The planet would not fall off its axis. “You buy bottled water,” Mueller says.

Total security is a pipe dream.

“The problem is that there are simply an infinite number of targets,” Mueller says. You can’t guard them all. And by focusing efforts on one — say, fire hydrants — “you’re just very slightly inconveniencing the terrorists.”

Congress asked the Homeland Security Department to draw up a list of potential terrorist targets. From salad bars to subways, the next ground zero could be literally anywhere.

 

“It’s actually up to 300,000 now,” Mueller says. “What you get are popcorn factories, mini-golf courses…even a tree in the middle of the forest is a terrorist target.”

Huh?

“Forest fires,” he says.

 

***

The United States government national threat level Elevated, or Yellow … All Americans should continue to be vigilant, take notice of their surroundings, and report suspicious items or activities to local authorities immediately.

— A Homeland Security Department advisory on any day of the week

Fire hydrant protection, like the no-shampoo-on-the-airplane rule, is a shining example of what Mueller calls “security theater.”

The term describes a measure that does little to actually make us safer — even if it is, like airport security, inconvenient and even humiliating — but does make people assume that the authorities are in control, that something is being done.

Both Democrats and Republicans join in the performance, calling for total vigilance and allocating billions of taxpayer dollars to often ill-conceived security programs, like a magical (excuse me, “high-tech”) wall along the Mexican border.

“The public at large is concerned,” Mueller says, “and that creates this permissive environment.”

The Homeland Security Department is the biggest federal bureaucracy since the Social Security Administration. The President’s proposed 2008 budget for the department is $46.4 billion, which includes an 8 percent increase in discretionary funding.

In 2004, its budget was “only” $36.2 billion.

Before 2002, most Americans wouldn’t say the word “homeland” with a straight face.
It’s hard to trace where all that money — your money — is going. The rise of Homeland Security came with unprecedented levels of official secrecy. Much once-public information about utilities, even those in private hands, is now hidden.

The feds can keep secret any “sensitive” information having to do with “critical infrastructure.” In practice, that can apply to pretty much anything.

Meanwhile, more national security tasks are being outsourced to private companies, many of which have benefited tangibly from ongoing wars and the terrorism threat.

The best-known example is that of Halliburton, an energy and defense company once led by Dick Cheney. After Cheney assumed the Vice Presidency and helped plan the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Halliburton and its subsidiaries received billions in government contracts. Last year the company’s gross profits were $3.87 billion, up from $1.14 billion in 2004. It recently opened a headquarters in Dubai, closer to the action.

Not all security contractors are so well-positioned.

Neither Tom Davidson, the inventor of the Anti-Terrorism Valve, nor his marketing agent, D. Michael Walden, nor the president of Mainline Homeland Security, Michael Green, are major political contributors.

But Mainline’s new parent, CHS Private Equity, is packed with players.

Since 2002, the company’s namesake partners — Andrew Code, Daniel Hennessy and Brian Simmons — have donated at least $86,000 to politicians and parties. Most of it went to Republicans, including George W. Bush and the Illinois party, but Barack Obama got $1,000 for his 2003 run for the U.S. Senate.

If there are more political ties in the hydrant-security business, they won’t be easily uncovered. Private equity firms like CHS are not obliged to reveal much about their investors. In recent years, such firms have been buying up large publicly traded companies. New acquisitions are announced almost every week.

The old watchdog’s adage, “follow the money,” is extremely difficult to practice in the new era of “public-private partnerships” and secretive “security” projects. Could Al Qaeda backers have money invested in the anti-terrorism business? Who would know?

Anyway, six years from now, the fire hydrants in your neighborhood may be impervious to evildoers, and your precious bodily fluids may be pure, but a few anonymous profiteers will also be significantly wealthier, thanks to your hard work and good citizenship.

It’s something to think about the next time you pay the water bill.