Provider of water pores over risk report

Central Arkansas Water executives delivered the results and recommendations of an updated vulnerability assessment report to the agency’s board of commissioners Thursday.

Under state law, the results of the report are kept confidential. The state’s Freedom of Information Act allows a public agency to meet in closed executive session to discuss the report, which the commission did.

Chief Executive Officer Graham Rich said before Thursday’s commission meeting that the water utility’s last vulnerability assessment was completed in 2004.

The report looks at areas of a utility that might be affected in the event of a threat, whether that be a terroristic threat or natural weather occurrence. All public water agencies were required to do an assessment after terrorists flew airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and crashed another passenger jet in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.

Rich said it was important to update Central Arkansas Water’s report after the Exxon Mobil pipeline rupture in Mayflower in March 2013. The Pegasus pipeline spilled 210,000 gallons of heavy crude oil in a neighborhood, some of which leaked into a cove of Lake Maumelle — the primary water source for more than 400,000 people in central Arkansas.

“We said, ‘You know, we probably really need to look at updating that assessment because now we know there are new threats,’” Rich said.

In addition to the pipeline, recent national events sparked an increased look at certain areas of the utility’s operations — specifically, cybersecurity. Last year, companies such as Target and Home Depot were hacked, leaving millions of credit card users’ information at risk.

The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing also prompted the update.

“The types of threats change. As we become more sophisticated from a technol- ogy standpoint, there’s a great chance of someone being able to disrupt service through what used to be a nontraditional way. And secondly, society changes. There are societal threats that are different, concerns that are different today than they were 20 or 30 years ago,” Rich said.

The utility began working on the updated assessment in 2013.

“The main thing they do is look at various risks posed to operations of a utility in fulfilling its mission — in this case, drinking water. It identifies recommendations to reduce or minimize those risks,” said John Tynan, the utility’s director of customer relations and public affairs.

There were recommendations made in the new report, but they weren’t made public. If any of the recommendations require a purchase of more than $50,000, the board of commissioners would have to approve that expenditure. In that case, the exact reason of the expense may not be made public to keep the confidentiality of the vulnerability assessment.

Before the commission went into executive session Thursday, it also got an update on a contract dispute with Jacksonville Water Works. Rich asked for 30 more days to work out an agreement with the other utility.

Jacksonville wants the mandatory minimum amount of water it must purchase daily under its contract with Central Arkansas Water to be lowered. The two utilities have been negotiating for months, but Rich said Thursday that Jacksonville’s latest offer still doesn’t work for the larger Little Rock-based utility.

He said he thinks both groups can get to an amount they can both agree on within the next month.