City Loses Chlorine Notification Law Suit

This afternoon, Judge James (Skeeter) Willis announced that the Delano Water Maintenance Department was liable for $1.2 million in actual and punitive damages for failure of their Chlorine Release Notification System (CRNS) to notify the residents of the Greenway Apartments of a pattern of chlorine leaks during January of this year. That notification system was required to be installed by Judge Willis after the 2016 chlorine release at the WMD facility injured sixteen people in that same apartment complex adjacent to the drinking water treatment facility.

Junior Butts, the lawyer for the complex, filed the law suit after hackers from the Students for Immediate Neutralization of Chlorine Technology and Energy Reversion (SFINCTER) published data from the CRNS showing a series of chlorine releases from the water disinfection system in January that were not reported to the residents of Greenway. Butts, a resident of the complex, is well known for his legal support of environmental activists including members of SFINCTER.

George Funderburke, the Director of the Delano WMD, argued at trial that the same hackers who accessed the wireless sensor network to obtain the data reported by SFINCTER could have planted that data during their illegal access to the system.

The SFINCTER hackers were not heard from at trial because of their potential for being arrested on federal computer hacking charges. Instead, Butts convinced Willis to request an investigation of the CRNS by the ECS-CERT. Immanuel C. Securitage, the Director of ECS-CERT, agreed to conduct the investigation only after receiving a formal request by Funderburke.

At trial, Securitage confirmed that the CRNS sensor logs showed the data that had been published on-line by SFINCTER. During cross examination he confirmed that known security issues with both the WiFi network equipment and the sensor system made it impossible to tell when the data was entered into the logs. Butts argued that those same security issues could be used to explain why there were inconsistencies in the pattern of readings from the sensor network that the defense argued demonstrated that the reported readings could not have come from any release during the weather conditions present on the days of the reputed releases.

                                             

In his comments before pronouncing judgement today, Willis noted that Delano WMD was responsible for the security of the CRNS network and could not use that inadequate security as a defense in this case. In any case, he noted, the settlement agreement in the previous case required that the CRNS provide immediate alerts whenever sensors reported chlorine readings in excess of 5 ppm and CRNS records showed no such reports from any of the releases recorded by the system.

William H. Lee, III, the Mayor of Delano, noted that the Delano WMD is owned by the City and the City self-insures. The payment of the fine will be discussed at the City Council meeting next week.