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Environmentalists want to protect the states’ rivers from running dry. The state and federal government want to keep public water supplies safe from terrorists. These competing interests have led to a battle over information, which is going before the state’s Freedom of Information Commission tomorrow.
There was a time when information about water supplies was not kept secret by the government.
“This is the inflow to the Shepaug Reservoir. This is the outflows from the Shepaug Reservoir, how many million gallons a day. Here, from the city of Waterbury, is a complete map of all of their reservoirs and how they’re all interconnected.”
Chip Ward is flipping through files he had put together back in 1995 when the river he had grown up on, the Shepaug, was running low.
“This was an extremely low year. There were many, many places you could walk across the river.”
Ward, who was trained as a chemical engineer, wanted to know if the Waterbury Water Company was taking more water from the Shepaug River than it needed to. He asked the company if he could look through their files.
“Essentially I got access to every bit of data that they had.”
That led Ward to a question: What if the company didn’t draw from the Shepaug at all?
“Is there enough water in their current reservoirs to meet their needs? And the answer was, ‘Yeah, there is enough water!’ Even in those severe drought conditions.”
Ward’s finding led to a legal settlement with the company, that restored the flow of the Shepaug River.
But since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the kind of information Ward used is no longer public. That’s because the federal government required water companies to pinpoint what parts of their water systems were vulnerable to attack. Betsy Gara is with the Connecticut Water Works Association:
“There had been discussions among Al Qaeda to look at contaminating system by introducing a chemical agent, or by physically disabling a water supply system.”
The next year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency encouraged states, like Connecticut, to pass their own laws to keep water supply information secret.
But environmentalists say not all of this information should be hidden. Margaret Miner of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut says the secrecy laws have become particularly troublesome to groups like hers. That’s why they’ve filed a complaint with the Freedom of Information Commission.
The state has been developing new stream flow regulations designed to balance the need for drinking water with the protection of rivers.
In order to negotiate on behalf of ecosystems, Miner sometimes wants to verify how much water companies have available and how much they need for their customers.
“Are they pinched in terms of supply? Or do they have actually excess water, that they could put into a stream, that they are looking to sell someplace else?”
Even a federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, has had trouble getting access. Virginia Delima is Director of the USGS Connecticut Water Science Center. A few years ago, she asked the Department of Public Health how much water was being withdrawn from certain reservoirs.
“They said they would make it available to us if we promised not to release it to the public, but that was something we couldn’t promise because all of our reports are available to the public.”
DeLima also asked water companies, public and private, who ran the reservoirs for the information. Some said: ‘yes’; others ‘no’, illustrating the uneven ways the law is enforced.
But many water companies say the amount of water in a particular reservoir should be protected. Ray Adamaitis of the Heritage Village Water Company in Southbury explains why:
“They don’t want to give out the size of those reservoirs, where they are. So someone can calculate how many pounds of chemicals they can dump into this reservoir in order to contaminate it.”
Heritage Village is one of the companies named in the complaint by Environmentalists. Adamaitis says his company doesn’t have reservoirs, it has wells, and the locations should be kept secret.
“What we don’t want is for people to know exactly where our well houses are so they can go in there and knock the door down possibly, and do something terrible. You just don’t want to make it easy for people to do things.”
But the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut says in order to protect rivers, they need access to water supply plans. The group is asking the Freedom of Information Commission to identify what security measures are needed to keep drinking water safe, and whether other information should be made public.
