Monday, October 09, 2006

Poisoning the Well

Update from Mikael: Hardly any reason to panic on this one: Today’s Jyllands-Posten; link in Danish, my translation:

It was three boys who were behind the poisoning of the drinking water in Greve last week. A boy aged 15 and two boys aged 12 haves admitted that they found the glass of strychnine — also known as rat-poison — in an abandoned house in Greve and threw it into the reservoir at the well.

It remains a mystery how the poison could get in contact with the water in the closed-circuit pipe system, but the police are continuing investigations.


No mention of the ethnic background of the boys, and it’s not really that interesting anyway IMHO.


According to a UPI story, a Danish reservoir has been poisoned with strychnine.

PoisonInvestigators believe that someone dumped rat poison in one of the wells that provides water for Greve Municipality outside Copenhagen, the Copenhagen Post reported. The well’s Plexiglass cover was smashed open.

[…]

“The episode worries me, because you think, what’ll it be next,” Erik Jurlander, a manager at Greve Waterworks told the newspaper Politiken. “We have coded locks for the waterworks, a sea of alarms and 24-hour security guards who are immediately notified if one of the alarms sounds.”
- - - - - - - - - -
Have “youths” been at work?

And is this the shape of things to come?


Hat tip: Tom Pechinski

15 comments:

Eric said...

Interesting, coming on the heels of Iraqi policement being poisoned.

Anonymous said...

Those darned 'youths' are at it again. I sure am glad the media gets that part right, eh?

Frank said...

When this is compared to what Denmark used to be like...

X said...

Actually this might be a positive sign. If the Plumbers Brotherhood of Peace (old knock at the BBC, google it, it's silly) are behind it then it means that they perceive their current tactics aren't working anymore, and that they're having to take more overt action to get the same level of intimidation. As a by-product this reveals their intentions more clearly to people and makes it harder for them to operate, as people become more wary of them.

Mikael said...

Hardly any reason to panic on this one: Todays
Jyllands-Posten Link in Danish, my translation:

It was three boys that was behind the poisoning of the drinking water in Greve last week. a boy aged 15 and two boys aged 12 has admitted that they found the glas of strynine - also known as rat-poison - in an abandoned house in Greve and threw it into the reservoir at the well.

It remains a mystery how the poison could get in contact with the water in the closed-circuit pipe system, but the police are continuing investigations.


No mention of the ethnic background of the boys, and it's not really that interesting anyway IMHO. Boys will be boys and all that, and 12-year olds are much too fascinated about the hair emerging around their Johnsons to think about politics. ( I now I was :-) )
Besides, the stryknine was highly diluted and never posed a threat to anyone, not even to rats. As a precausion the tank was emmediately sealed off and emptied.

Problem is of course, if a couple of kids can get into the pipe-system so can a terrorist. And he would not restrain himself to dropping a few milliliters of stryknine into the drinking water...

kepiblanc said...

The fact that the MSM don't mention the ethnicity of the boys clearly indicates : Muslims. I'll lay a million to a donut that if those kids were Danes, the MSM would go out of their way to emphasize just that.

Besides, boys will be boys is quite true, but it is standard Islamic procedure to use minors for "honor killings", looting, rioting and suicide missions because minors get milder sentences.

Wally Ballou said...

For Pete's sake: Mountain

But happy anniversary, you all.

Anonymous said...
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heroyalwhyness said...

Hardly any reason to panic on this one? Huh?

I suppose you're right, if its generally unremarkable for the teens you know in your neighborhood to be thinking . ..gee, what should we do with this strychnine - leave it where we found it, or, let's go break the plexiglass dome on the water well and dump it there.

Sure, nothing to be concerned about.(rolls eyes)

Mikael said...

Kepiblanc;
Besides, boys will be boys is quite true, but it is standard Islamic procedure to use minors for "honor killings", looting, rioting and suicide missions because minors get milder sentences.

Very true. This just in: href="http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article.php/id-5059994.html">TV2

(again, link in Danish, my trans.):

A 49 year old man has been charged of pressuring his teenage-boy to stab his mother with a knife.

The mother was stabbed in the stomache in october last year in her appartment.

Shortly thereafter her then 13-year old son turned himself in. He brought along the knife, packed in kithen roll paper, still with some blood on it.But according to the Prosecution the now 14-year old is not the only culprit. They beleive the boy's father is the mastermind behind. The father denies the charges.

The husbond has previously been convicted of threats against the wife and a social worker.

"I'll kill you and cut your head off" was one of the message's he made his oldest son to send via SMS.

The couple came to Denmark in the early '90'ies because he was persecuted in Iraq.

Tomorrow the woman and her son, who did the stabbing will take the stand. Sentence is exspected thursday.


How nice that a barbaric country like Denmark is so culturally inriched by people devoted the The Religion of Peace, the only religion truly respecting the integrity of women!

I'm so sick and tired of this shite!

Mikael said...
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Frank said...

Mr. Weinert:

Just a heads up: When you shriek and bellow and carry on like a howling dervish, people tend not to listen to what you say. All I needed was to see a "Praise the Lord Gawd Almighty" coupled with a prayer for hellfire and brimstone to fall on the heads of the "monsters" or some such, and I lost all interest.

If we want to stop Islam, we can't wait for God to strike it dead, and if we want to win hearts and minds in the west so that the west will stop Islam, we probably ought not appear insane. Just a thought...

Mikael said...

@Heroyalhwyness:

Roll your eyes all you want. What, you've never been 12? Kids at that age will do incredibly stupid things no matter what neighborhood they live in. They will drop rocks from a bridge at passing cars on the freeway, they will place logs on railroad tracks just to see what happens, they will kill helpless animals in the most cruel way. They will, in short, do the most idiotic, stupid, insane things one could possibly imagine. Simply because they can. They feel - for the first time in their lives - they have power and strenght but they have no idea what to do with it.

With all this said, I'm not trying to dismiss what those boys have done. In my opinion they should have their butts whooped! But if you think I live in a neighborhood, or a country or indeed a continent that will simply shrug off a ting like poisoning a puplic well as mere "boys will be boys", you are very much mistaking. The whole purpose of my initial post was to say that this is hardly some bin-Laden ordered attack. But it did expose a security breach in the public water supply.
And that is something to be taken very seriously!

@Pharonath:

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. That was precicely the point I was trying to make.

Wally Ballou said...

Right on, Mikael. When I was 12, I would have loved to have made a bomb. I even tried, though ineptly. I didn't want to hurt anyone, I just wanted to blow something up. I might have done just what those boys did (and felt terrible afterwards).

It is certainly true that they need to look at the water supply security. It is also true that poisoning a publc water supply is exceedingly difficult. I don't think it's ever been done to a large supply. Try googling it and you'll hear a lot about threats and hoaxes, but not successful deliberate poisonings. Remember "the dose makes the poison" and "dilution is the solution to pollution" (as we say in the water business). Back in the 70's, there was a lot of paranoia about "LSD in teh reservoirs", but that was bruited about by people who weren't too good at math or chemistry. You could put a million dollars worth of acid in the DC reservoir, and the effects would still be merely homeopathic.

A far likelier targer for terrorist mischief at a water or wastewater treatment plant is the gaseous chlorine supply tanks, which would be a deadly threat to the immediate neighborhood. That's where most plants rightly concentrate their security efforts.

Anonymous said...

I could blog all day on the stuff I did as a kid....a bomb was made, and my model rocketry kit was confiscated by the town fire department.

Nuf said.