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Local and federal authorities are investigating after an attempt on Friday to poison the town of Oldsmar’s water supply, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.
Someone remotely accessed a computer in the city’s water treatment system and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, by a factor of over 100, Gualtieri said at a press conference on Monday. The chemical is used in small amounts to control the acidity of the water, but it’s also a corrosive compound commonly found in household cleaning products such as liquid drain cleaners.
The city’s water supply has not been affected. A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration change on his computer screen and immediately canceled it, Gualtieri said. City officials stressed on Monday that several other protective measures were in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they had disabled the remote access system used in the attack.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating, along with the FBI and the Secret Service, Gualtieri said.
No one has been arrested, Gualtieri said, although investigators have some leads. They don’t know why Oldsmar was targeted, he said. He added that other municipalities in the region have been alerted to the attack and encouraged to inspect the warranties of their water treatment systems and other infrastructure.
Although some towns get water through Pinellas County, Oldsmar provides water directly to its businesses and to around 15,000 residents, Gualtieri said. The IT system of the wastewater treatment plant was set up to allow authorized users to access it remotely for troubleshooting.
A plant operator was monitoring the system around 8 a.m. on Friday and noticed that someone had briefly accessed it. He did not find this unusual, Gualtieri said, as his supervisor regularly accessed the system remotely.
But around 1:30 p.m. the same day, Gualtieri said, someone entered the system again. This time, he said, the operator watched someone take control of the mouse, point it at the software that controls the water treatment, work on it for three to five minutes, and increase the amount. of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts. per million.
The attacker left the system, Gualtieri said, and the operator immediately changed the focus to 100 parts per million.
“At no time was there a significant negative effect on the treated water,” said the sheriff. “Above all, the public has never been in danger.”
Even if the operator had not caught it, he said, it would have taken more than a day for water to enter the water supply.
“The protocols we have in place, the monitoring protocols, they are working – that’s the good news,” Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel said. “Even if they hadn’t caught them, there are redundancies in the system that would have detected the change in the pH level.
“The important thing is to warn everyone,” he said. “There’s a bad actor over there.”
Senator Marco Rubio also referred to the attack in a tweet on Monday, saying it “should be treated as a matter of national security”.
The sheriff’s office was notified of the attack and began investigating Friday evening, Gualtieri said. Investigators do not yet know whether or not the attack originated in Pinellas County, Florida or the United States. If the attacker is apprehended, he said, he will face state felony charges and possibly federal charges.
Contact with sodium hydroxide can kill the skin and cause hair loss, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Ingestion can be fatal.
Gualtieri said he was not sure what physiological effects would result from the focus of the attack. It was also not immediately obvious that a similar attack ever occurred in the United States. In 2007, water in one town in Massachusetts was accidentally treated with too much lye, causing burns and skin irritation in people who showered.
“I’m not a chemist,” said Gualtieri. “But I can tell you what I know is that if you put that amount of this substance in drinking water, it’s not a good thing.
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