Large Scale Sanitation Network Attack Plausibility

I honestly have no clue how this thought came to me last night but I have had much fun thinking about it since. So here is the question to all of you,

What is the plausibility of a large scale sanitation based attack in a large city, and what would be the associated repercussions? For example sewers, water treatment plants, water pipelines, ext.

Edit: lolol -1 for creating a interesting conversational topic. I am such a horrible member of Fakku.

Well depends on the structure of the sewers and the pipelines and such.
The damage could be immense if the structure of the waters was holding other structures as well and that when the pipes go lose so will the other built structures. Lets just call it a domino effect where one after the other breaks loose.


By the way I pictured a scenario about this and it could end up catastrophic.

It could end up costing millions if not possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Water has to be filtered again and that takes time and rebuilding the structures takes immense effort and time.


Yup Never mess with the power of water.. it's one of the basic elements of life.

I just cant wrap my head around what a large city would do if someone say poisoned a water treatment plant and set off a chain reaction of explosives in the sewer system.

Not only would it cost a damn big sum of cash to fix it all but how would the system handle the stress of having multiple sewer lines down. Do cities even have backup plans for such things?

There's usually a lot of pipes, and easy to turn them off. If a certain area loses water due to an explosion you can connect some other pipes with each other and the water will get there. I have no expertise what so ever in this area but I'm 100% convinced that the bombs would do more damage above ground. They do check that the water is clean as well so I don't know if it's possible to do any significant poisoning, guess it'll depend on the facility.

Well I can understand not having a back up plan for a chain of explosives anywhere in the first place but for the first there's actually quite a lot of ways to solve such a problem. first of all, the villain behind this would have to have enough poison so that it would polluted enough to actually cause damage to someone. An example of this would be the free-air sanitation plants of new York whereas dead animals, animal feces, dead plants, pollutants, ground water seepage, and rain often contaminate the water during sanitation processes yet the water is generally found to be safe to drink. Next, the problem would be a lack of ready accessibility to luxuries, not a lack of water. Not only can personal filtration be suggested, the public disclosed to, and bottled or prefiltered water be distributed, but often enough a person in dire straits can use iodine and boiling methods to purify the water to a drinkable condition. Also, what kind of poison are you thinking of? Unless you were to dump hundreds thousands of gallons of some sort of chemical compound that would lead to quick death from respiratory depression or perhaps even failure of the body's many parts, it would be nearly impossible to get any kind of poison near lethal enough and unnoticeable to put in any sanitation network without it being detected. What you can do however is increase the amount of microbial agents in the water to cause deadly side effects upon any would be drinker. These include Entamoeba histolytica,Echinococcus granulosus, and Vibrio cholerae amongst the many other agents of death hidden within shallow waters.

Hmm never even thought about the computer controlled systems in regards to sanitation. You could definitely do some damage by messing around with relays, power to plants, ext.
I know the threat of EMP and virus attacks on everything else is another unthinkable problem that needs to be addressed.

In regards to the poison idea I do not have much information in regards to how someone would implement it. I would imagine to get a high enough concentration you would have to use a very concentrated compound introduced into local water connections as they enter buildings. So for those attacks it would be smaller but multiple attacks.

A more serious threat, especially in an urban area, would be to collapse or block the sewer system, giving septic water no outlet. The resulting overflow would likely contaminate the drinking water, and result in a massive threat of disease. It has already been shown that FEMA and the CDC are insufficiently prepared to counter such a large scale disaster.

It is doubtful that such sites will ever be high on anyone's target list, however, as most terror organizations tend to target large and obviously important places. Very few of them would take credit for blowing up a sewage plant for fear of looking foolish to the world.

They would not look foolish to the world with all the televised fall out if you ask me. "terrorist attack destroys over half of Chicago's sewage system" would be a damn serious headline.

Destroying or contaminating that of a human beings need in life is ALWAYS serious.
Food poisoning
Unclean water
Polluted air
Drugs in food and liquids
All that can be a serious F***fest if that were to happen.

Most of all WATER.

Breaking ones Pc or your little bro scribbling on your breakthrough findings are not that bad... but FOOD and Water are the basis of human survival.

From both of your reactions, it is obvious that you think I was trying to downplay the seriousness of this scenario, but I assure you that was not my intent. What I was trying to convey, in my second paragraph, was that Terror organizations thrive on the publicity they gain when they make an attack. It draws money, recruits and support from sympathetic nations and makes them look powerful. They choose targets based on furthering their political agendas, not just because they will bring a bigger body count. As long as terrorists were just a bunch of guys that hijacked a plane full of people, every now and then, the world was content to let these groups get away relatively unscathed, but Bin Laden changed the playing field. An attack of the magnitude of the one discussed in this post, would cause a worldwide response that would make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq look like minor skirmishes, and the terrorist groups know this. Not to mention, that most of these groups are based in areas of the world where water is in relatively short supply. In those areas, the poisoning of a water source is considered a worse crime than killing a thousand innocent children. An attack like this would be more likely to alienate them from their own culture, so they would never own up to it. This was the point I was trying to make, without drawing the discussion too far off topic.

This is the Serious Discussion Forum, Gentlemen, not Incoherent Babbling. If you disagree with what I have posted, I can accept that and respect your differing opinion. But you should be able to respond in a clear, respectful manner without resorting to profanity.

I totally agree with you and I just wanted to point out some examples.

How would any of that put the topic off in a bad direction? I simply wanted detailed conversation about thoughts of such an event. What you just posted was a very highly detailed response that now adds 100% more clarity to your above statement.