By PSC Chair Charlotte Lane
When I was a young girl growing up in Pleasants County, my greatest fear was catching poison ivy or getting stung by a bee. Back then, the world seemed a lot simpler, a lot slower, and a lot safer. But since the turn of the century, or thereabouts, it looks like things took a turn for the worse.
I’m not sure it is the proliferation of communications devices that turned us into a real-life Dick Tracy world, where we quite literally have all of the communications in the world at our fingertips. But suddenly we are aware of every danger, every terrorist act, every shooting, and every other horrible thing going on.
Whether the world really is a lot more dangerous than it was back then or we’re just more aware of things, our leadership at the state and national levels certainly think that it is. And we at the Public Service Commission of West Virginia are paying much more attention to the security of the electric, water, gas, sewer, and similar systems that serve you each day.
We more often refer to these systems as infrastructure. And that infrastructure comprises the basic building blocks that allow for communications, travel, and a host of services that make us comfortable at home and allow us to work in our offices. The utilities that provide critical infrastructure services to you have to be on high alert these days to any number of possible threats to their security and their ability to provide those services.
At one time, terrorist acts were remote to West Virginia. They happened elsewhere – in the big cities – not here. But the Oklahoma City bombings proved that wasn’t so. Massacres that have occurred in small towns across the nation underscore the sad fact that those things can happen, even in the Mountain State.
Our Legislature passed the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act this year to beef up security at these critical infrastructure points, to expand the facilities and structures that fall under the law, and to enhance penalties that existed in prior law for dealing with these matters.
We at the Public Service Commission welcome these changes, while we mourn that the world in which I grew up has changed in many, many ways. A lot of changes have been very good, but some of them reflect the very worst. We will do our part to keep your utilities safe.
CUTLINE:
PSC Chair Charlotte Lane