This story holds both local and national implications. It’s interesting to the locals because someone put a bomb in an important dam. At the national scale, it highlights our own domestic vulnerabilities.
The Gulf Coast Regional Maritime Response and Render-Safe Team retrieved and detonated an improvised explosive device found underwater at the Converse Reservoir dam, the Mobile Area Water and Sewer System announced Tuesday.
The multi-agency effort included the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, FBI Bomb Squad, Mobile Police Department Explosive Ordinance Detail, ALEA Bomb Squad and the Daphne Search and Rescue Team.
Divers surveying the dam for routine repair and maintenance located the grenade-type IED. MAWSS alerted the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, which coordinated the multi-agency response for analysis, retrieval and safe demolition.
“Our top priority is keeping your drinking water safe,” said Bud McCrory, MAWSS director. “This is an unprecedented threat, and we are fortunate that this device was discovered before it could cause serious damage to our water supply or harm to individuals. We are grateful for the professionalism and competency of our law enforcement partners – as well as the quick thinking of our contractors and divers – in identifying this device and safely destroying it.”
That story concluded with a very alarming observation. Homeland security was alerted and called in because…
…the federal government as designated both this dam and the reservoir as ‘critical federal infrastructure’.
I’m old enough to remember when the whole world freaked out when we were afraid computers couldn’t calculate for Y2K (kids can ask their chatbots, or their grandparents). Planes might fall out of the sky, or — somehow more insidious — out water systems could be contaminated and start killing people.
That was a computer glitch that never happened.
This is a makeshift bomb, right here in the real world. Right under our noses.A threat none of us even knew to think about, let alone look for.
Source: Clash Daily
