Lets poison the water supply by Matt Giwer, © 2002 [July]
Things are becoming curiouser and curiouser. A man was just arrested "carrying plans and materials to poison the water supply" of some unidentified city. No further information has been made available. But from general knowledge we can reconstruct the plan and determine how much material he was carrying. The first requirement is to deliver a lethal dose of a poison to people so our first effort is to find the poison. We keep in mind the lethal dose must be delivered in essentially one dose, say in no more than one day. One one-hundredth of a lethal dose for one hundred days will not work, nor with one-tenth of a dose for ten days. For example, there is chlorine in most drinking water supplies. Chlorine is harmless in that dosage but lethal in large doses. Next we look at the water supply and how it is used. Most water is used for sanitation, showers and toilets one flush of a toilet uses more water than consumed by a family of four in an entire day. One shower uses more than that. Given four flushes per person per day and one shower per person per day and assuming that one day's worth of drinking water is lethal we need to deliver at least twenty five times the lethal per person dose to each household. Then we have to take into account other uses for water, industrial uses, lawn watering and such. This varies around the country and with the season of the year so lets just double the required amount to fifty times the lethal amount. This means if one gram (one twenty-fifth of an ounce) of a poison is lethal then we must deliver fifty grams per person per household. Most of the classic poisons such as arsenic and strychnine are in the one gram per person category. At first blush it appears we do not have to search for an exotic poison. However if we are going to poison a city of a half million people we need fifty million grams. That is fifty thousand kilograms which is 110,000 pounds or fifty tons. If you have seen a one ton pickup truck fill up fifty of them. Now we have to get the poison into the water system. If we dump it into a reservoir it will pass through the purification plant. There the water will be tested, the poison discovered and the heinous plot fails. If by the will of FEMA it is not discovered the chances are not much is going to survive the purification process. Then we realize if we dump it into a reservoir we have to dump enough to create a lethal dose in every gallon as we can't get just the poisoned water into the purification intake pipes. Oops. Buying one hundred thousand tons of arsenic will attract attention as it is five times more than the US uses in a year. There goes the heinous plot. But if we succeed all the fish and frogs are poisoned. All the birds that prey on them are poisoned. Someone notices. Our plot is foiled. So we have to find a way to get our fifty tons of poison into the water supply after it leaves the water treatment plant. The outflow pipes are under pressure so when we dig down to them and cut a hole in them with the intention of shoveling the poison in the water gushes to the sky, repairmen arrive and foiled again. There appears to be a pattern emerging here. How about some mysterious poison that kills in extremely small doses? There are none commonly available. None is lethal in a dosage of 10 micrograms but that is a modest LSD trip. So if there are 100 million gallons in a reservoir, that is about 400 million liters meaning we would need only about 1000 gallons of LSD to accomplish a plot to mellow out a city. The only truly important question here is, What is in the White House drinking water? Is the US Department of Justice of sound mind? Even assuming there is some "plan" that only the nefarious and cunning al Qaeda can devise just how many tens of tons of poison was he carrying? Was it in a humongous briefcase or a backpack worthy of Atlas? Rest assured we are safe. The terrorist has been thrown into prison never to be seen or heard from again. God bless America.
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