In the movie dreamcatcher an alien tries to poison the Quabbin reservoir (A man made reservoir used to supply Bostons drinking supply) I live 5 minutes away from said Reservoir and was just wondering, out of all the times I’ve been there I see no security or anything. Is it just too large of a pool of water where poison of some sort would become too diluted? Or are there too strong chemicals dumped in the water? (Which I can’t imagine is the case due to a lot of fishing going on there)
So yeah just curious if anyone knows how it is prevented. Used chemistry flair since it seemed most appropriate.
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The Quabbin is untreated water. It is treated and filtered many times before it gets becomes potable water and enters into the municipal supply. Though, I cannot say as to weather or not our human water treatment technology is sufficient to remove 100% of alien poisons.
There is a lot of water in that reservoir. You can’t just pour a quart of poison into it and do anything. Sure, sci-fi uses super alien poison, but that’s not how real poisons work. If you pull up in a tanker truck and start pouring something into the reservoir, there are likely cameras. Regardless, the water goes from the reservoir into a treatment plant which cleans it of many things.
There isn’t really a substance that exists which could be practically used to render such a large volume of water toxic, and have it remain so long enough to poison someone.
There’s plenty of poisonous substances easily available, but you’d need truckload quantities of them to achieve a toxic level in something like a reservoir.
That’s ignoring the fact that any toxins would then need to withstand degradation in the aquatic environment and whatever water purification process is used before it goes into the municipal water system.
In addition to the other good answers, water treatment systems for large municipalities have continuous monitoring and testing programs in place to detect and stop most of the known pathogens, so they would immediately divert a raw water source if anything was detected. It’s not as though people haven’t tried by the way, hence the existence of the monitoring systems.
In one of the Batman movies, the villain is doing that and they had to show him tapping in (somehow) to the POST treatment water pipes in order to make it happen. The flaw in that movie was in depicting the pipes as being broken open and the water still flowing through them normally to where they could add the poison. That’s not how that works.
That’s of course another reason why it had to be an ALIEN poison in your story…
Here in Portland we have two large open-air reservors on Mt Tabor. The water is filtered and decontaminated on its way out. Still, we had an incident where a guy peed in one and that one has been empty since.
Pretty sure Mr Gray wasn’t trying to poison the resevoir.
He was trying to infect it with parasitic larvae.
Birds shit and die in reservoirs as to other animals. The bottom of the reservoirs are covered in mud an algae. I think there is more filtering before it comes into our taps. We don’t store filtered water there, just water ready for processing.
I think you’re right though … just too much volume too.
It’s just too much water.
Even assuming you use something like botulinum toxin (which about the most poisonous stuff in existence), you’d need hundreds of tonnes (and global production of that stuff is like *1 gram per year*, so those quantities don’t even exist) to contaminate the water enough to poison people drinking a reasonable quantity of the water.
And people would notice dozens of semis rolling up and dumping shit in the lake.
First some math. Quabin reservoir is 1560000000000 L in volume according to wikipedia. Fentanyl has an LD50 (presumably by injection) in monkeys of 0,03 mg/kg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137794/. LD 50 is the value required to kill half the animals tested. We assume LD50 is the same for humans so killing a human weighing 80 kg with 50% certainty requires 2.4 mg. If you drink 1 L of water the concentration has to be 2,4 mg per liter. Evenly distributed that works out to you needing 3744 tons of fentanyl to reach the desired concentration. That’s without accounting for half life, administration route, or elimination from the body. If you have trucks capable of carrying 20 tons that works out to you needing 187 trucks. Counting loading and aqusition you probably need something like 200-300 people (for simultainius delivery. They all need to keep their mouth shut and not be poisoned while handling the fentanyl.
TLDR; the dimensions of such a project are massive
So as many have already mentioned dilution is a huge part of it. I’m going to venture out and say that it’s totally possible to poison a water supply, but it’s a major logistics operation not a one man thing.
Once the substance is in the water there is the mater of degradation, binding to organic matter and absorbance by different organisms.
This to first points are exaserbated by the water intake being placed deep increasing the time from addition to the reservoir to intake in the cleaning system.
Lastly rinsing. For most chemicals this would not present a barrier, though UV or chlorine treatment might lead to degrading reactions However poison absorbed by organisms or bound to organic material will be filtered out.
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