Water, Water Everywhere: The Krakens, Kelpies, and Mermaids in today’s Water Sector

Dean Ford, an automation engineer with decades of control systems work, opens with the basics of water. Only about 2.5 percent of Earth's water is fresh, and less than a third of that is practically reachable. The United States has more than 151,000 public water systems, most of them local and loosely connected, so a failure often becomes a local outage rather than a regional cascade. He then shows who draws on water, with thermoelectric power and irrigation as the largest withdrawals, and hospitals as customers that cannot go without supply even briefly.

The middle of the talk covers threats beyond hacking. He describes scarcity, aging buried pipe, contaminants such as PFAS, sewer overflows, and staff turnover that takes knowledge of valves and procedures out the door with retiring operators. Utilities often cannot raise rates, so they struggle to pay for upgrades. On the cyber side he cites legacy controllers and radios with weak or no authentication, and purchases made without security review. He argues that the 2023 Jackson, Mississippi failure came from underfunding and staffing rather than weather, and that cyber is one risk among many.

For takeaways, he suggests that cyber funding can pay for broader resilience work, that digital twins could preserve operating knowledge and serve as training tools, and that OT, IT and engineering should be managed together with fewer, better-trained staff. He also notes that European NIS2 rules bring water into supply-chain scrutiny, and argues that downstream manufacturers relying on water should help pay for its security. The session closes with audience questions on semiconductor plants' water demand and recovery from attacks on pressure systems.