Uncle Sam Wants Your Product
From June 2006
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Two of the 17 elements that make up the infrastructure are particularly intertwined economically and historically with Northern California and the Sacramento region: agriculture and water.
In 2003, DHS declared the nation’s critical infrastructures to be agriculture and food, water, public health and healthcare, emergency services, the defense industrial base, information technology, telecommunications, energy, transportation systems, banking and finance, chemical, postal and shipping, national monuments and icons, dams, government facilities, commercial facilities, and nuclear reactors, materials and waste.
Complementing DHS efforts, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is responding to potential terrorist attacks to the nation’s air and water. Detection, containment and treatment technology proposals for airborne contaminants, including biologic pathogens such as anthrax and several other deadly threats, are being sought by EPA officials.
“There is always room for technical development to take it to the next level,” says Eric Koglin, manager of the EPA’s Technical Testing and Evaluations Programs. Decontamination technology and alternative water-supply methods for large populations are also wanted.
Earlier this year, UC Davis co-hosted a symposium on agro-terrorism; the first in a series planned for around the country. Attendees, mostly from nearby farm bureaus and local government agencies, learned about the potential threats to contaminating crops and the transportation networks getting those crops to market. The university’s Western Institute for Food Safety and Security hosted the event along with the Yolo County Agriculture Department and the DHS.
Five years ago, the idea of a Yolo County rice farmer spending a day learning about the possibility of a terrorist plot on his crop and his livelihood would have seemed ridiculous.
Those days are gone.
In 2003, DHS declared the nation’s critical infrastructures to be agriculture and food, water, public health and healthcare, emergency services, the defense industrial base, information technology, telecommunications, energy, transportation systems, banking and finance, chemical, postal and shipping, national monuments and icons, dams, government facilities, commercial facilities, and nuclear reactors, materials and waste.
Complementing DHS efforts, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is responding to potential terrorist attacks to the nation’s air and water. Detection, containment and treatment technology proposals for airborne contaminants, including biologic pathogens such as anthrax and several other deadly threats, are being sought by EPA officials.
“There is always room for technical development to take it to the next level,” says Eric Koglin, manager of the EPA’s Technical Testing and Evaluations Programs. Decontamination technology and alternative water-supply methods for large populations are also wanted.
Earlier this year, UC Davis co-hosted a symposium on agro-terrorism; the first in a series planned for around the country. Attendees, mostly from nearby farm bureaus and local government agencies, learned about the potential threats to contaminating crops and the transportation networks getting those crops to market. The university’s Western Institute for Food Safety and Security hosted the event along with the Yolo County Agriculture Department and the DHS.
Five years ago, the idea of a Yolo County rice farmer spending a day learning about the possibility of a terrorist plot on his crop and his livelihood would have seemed ridiculous.
Those days are gone.
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