Are U.S. Water Systems Being Targeted by Iran?

While officials said they had not definitively determined who did the attacks, federal and state investigators believe that they were carried out by Iran. A local official in Minnesota told the New York Times that they, meaning the state and the FBI, are pretty sure it's Iranian actors, but they are reluctant to say so publicly. However, the Times reported that those responsible could have been posing as being based in Iran to heighten tensions with the U.S.  Trump weighed in on Friday, July 31, saying that the attacks were due to Minnesota’s government being incompetent, not because of Iran.

There was little impact on water facilities. At least one water system was offline early in the week, and some others used manual methods to get around the problems. There were no reports that any water had been made unsafe for drinking. 

Water and wastewater companies in at least seven states, including Michigan and Georgia, reported incidents consistent with the attacks. Rockwell Automation, whose products were targeted, issued a release that helps water utilities regain access to systems when the password is not known, presumably because it could have been changed.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s plan for the next two years is expected to be finalized in the coming weeks, and those three Lower Basin states together might be forced to cut their usage each year by three million acre-feet—an amount that would serve 25 million people. The Arizona Department of Water Resources said in a statement that this amount was unacceptable and would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.

Every two years, the Department of the Interior will issue operating guidelines, unless the states in the Basin have agreed on longer-term plans, something that so far has been very difficult. The proposal has “guardrails” about how water should be conserved and stored in reservoirs. 

The three states required to take less water have a plan that the Associated Press reports would halve the total, after which priority water rights would determine the rest—a system that generally benefits seniority of California users. Every two years, the Bureau would consider reductions based on the situation in the Colorado River Basin. Low snowfall this past winter in areas that feed the river resulted in the two largest reservoirs in the country, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, falling to their lowest levels on record.

As H2O Radio reported last week, it’s been expected that Arizona will suffer the greatest cuts to its Colorado River allocation. Sources told the Los Angeles Times that the state’s share could be cut by 31 percent. Currently, the Bureau of Reclamation plan does not impose any cuts on the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, but it did analyze voluntary conservation of 200,000 acre-feet in the short term.

Gary Wockner, a vocal critic of the Bureau’s plan and executive director of the organization Save the Colorado, said in a statement that the proposal will continue to pay farmers and cities not to use water, while trying to save Glen Canyon Dam, which ignores the science of climate change that makes the dam obsolete.

The Bureau of Reclamation plan can be found here.

Researchers at UCLA found that in the Sacramento Valley, which is at the northern end of the Central Valley between Sacramento and Redding, California, the huge withdrawals reduced the water pressure within the porous sediments where water collects in the aquifer, causing them to compact and land surfaces to sink by more than half a meter. 

This kind of subsidence can be reversible or “elastic” once rains return, but in the Sacramento Valley, the aquifer compacted so quickly and extensively the researchers say it likely permanently lost its capacity to store water.

The team used high-resolution satellite measurements together with local monitoring well data to reach their conclusions. They say compaction within the Sacramento Valley will likely continue for years to come and recommend that state officials consider declaring the aquifer as “critically overdrafted.” That would allow them to impose limits on groundwater pumping as they did in the San Joaquin Valley, which subsided by as much as nine meters in the 20th century, in some places, permanently.

Land subsidence does more than reduce storage capacity. It raises the risk of floods and threatens irrigation canals, roads, and other infrastructure. However, the team says using real-time satellite monitoring could give land managers an early warning to slow pumping—before it does irreparable harm.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Last week, the American Red Cross put out an SOS for only the second time in its 145-year history that it’s running out of blood and blamed extreme heat, poor air quality, and widespread foodborne illnesses for low donor turnout this summer. As the nation's largest provider of blood products, the Red Cross now has less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood—the most commonly transfused blood type. To ensure that there is enough blood available for patients facing critical, life-threatening emergencies across the country, the Red Cross has begun limiting distributions of type O blood to individual hospitals.

Nicole Maul, with the American Red Cross, told E&E News that the crisis is being exacerbated by heat, wildfires, storms, floods, and other disasters affecting attendance at blood drives or shutting down collection events. Severe weather and heat can also make it harder to transport blood to hospitals. 

To make an appointment to give blood—of any type—visit RedCrossBlood.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767).