 Today we want to talk a little bit about what the City of Columbia does to keep our water safe for customers and residents around the city. Recently in Florida, a utility had a lot of cybersecurity issues that caused a hacker to get into their utility security system. Could you talk a little bit about what happened there and how Columbia is different? Absolutely. Something that definitely caught our attention as well. And I think it's really important anytime something like that happens to understand the how and the why and really the how that happened so we can make sure that our assets and our facilities and our precious quality drinking water is protected. So we've done a little bit of research into that and talked with quite a few folks to understand how did this happen. It was a smaller utility in Florida, I won't name names, but they were using an outdated version of the Windows operating software. They were also not using a firewall in their computer systems that run a lot of the plant processes were connected directly to the internet without a firewall. We also learned that there were some fairly weak password protection policies in place there. So that allowed an outside hacker to access the computer system that helps run the facility, adjust a treating compound dosage amount and maximize that amount, take it up to the maximum range. And so that altered the pH of the finished water. Luckily the operators, the most important resource we have is our human capital and our certified operators. They caught it before any water left the treatment plant and it was not harmful to customers. So that was a blessing that it was caught. But you view that as really a bullet that was dodged. So immediately we started working with our staff and our information technology team, which is a great job supporting us in the cybersecurity space to understand how we're different. Let's make sure every issue that was identified in Florida is not an issue for us. We use current licensed operating systems that have very frequent security updates. We have a cybersecurity team that helps protect our supervisory control and data acquisition, our SCADA system that helps run our treatment works at both of our treatment plants. That is not connected directly to the internet. It is double firewall protected and we have a very stringent password policy as well. There are several other things that I won't speak to, but it's a very robust cybersecurity plan in place. That makes us very different from an IT security standpoint and less vulnerable than they were in Florida. The other thing that, and I mentioned it before, human capital, our most precious asset are our certified operators. Both of our water treatment facilities are staffed 24-7, 365 days a year by well-trained licensed certified operators. And so the team has a testing regimen where if, God forbid, something were to happen similar to what happened in Florida, our operators would detect that quickly through their battery of laboratory tests that they run. So it's one thing to allow the computer to provide feedback and then automatic pacing and those sorts of things. But we're doing the human back check to make sure the dosages of the treating compounds are correct, that the facility is running like it should, and we verify water quality within lab operator run test on a very frequent basis. So had something like that happened here, our operators would have caught that with their laboratory test and been able to shut things down and do corrective measures before that water quality would have gotten up to our customers. Very, very important. We take it very seriously. We think about it every day. But we feel comfortable with the procedures that we've got in place. You can never say never, but we believe that we're prepared for those types of things. Could you also talk about the incidents in Texas and how that ice storm impacted their water supply? Yeah, just tragic what happened, you know, just a subarctic mass of air came down and kind of camped out over Texas and some of the other southern states and they just hadn't seen freezing temperatures for that duration. And it really had a very negative impact on their power grid, which then cascaded down to supplies for water utilities and how they're able to power their facilities both to treat and distribute drinking water. So the freezing temperatures, not only power outages from supply standpoint, distribution, limbs falling on power lines when you've got ice accumulation, that's always can be an issue. But also freezing of water mains, freezing of household plumbing that exerts a fairly high demand on a water system when you've got pipe breaks, whether they're, you know, a utility-owned break or a customer-owned break, it's still water escaping the system and exerting a high demand. All that happening in a period where maybe there's limited power availability to treat and pump. It's kind of the perfect storm there and it created a lot of boil water advisories, system-wide boil water advisories, a lot of water shortages and frankly outages for quite a large number of folks in many localities in Texas. So it's something that also we understand that the supply of treating compounds was interrupted because of snow and ice on roads. And so the facilities maybe weren't able to get the supplies that they needed. And so a lot of issues there, how are we different? We start studying those types of things when they happen and think about how are we different? What are we doing that would protect us? Being a coastal state, we deal with hurricanes a little more frequently than we do the deep, hard subarctic freezes, but that's something that can happen as well that we have to be prepared for. So one thing I think is worth pointing out, we're part of the Eastern United States power grid and so there's some shared generation and shared responsibility for keeping that grid up and going. There's also a Western grid. Texas is almost a grid unto itself. So they didn't have the benefit of maybe taking power that was generated in another state or two over that wasn't impacted by the weather event and sending it to their customers. We're part of the Eastern grid, so we've got that flexibility. Our power provider Dominion has that flexibility to share power. So a little stronger in terms of generation redundancy there. So that's one point. Also we've got dual feeds from Dominion. They're a great business partner for us. And anytime we do have an outage, they're very responsive to treating us as a critical customer and getting our power restored. So we've got good quality, good reliability from our utility provider. And that's where it starts. Beyond that, we understand that things can happen. And so we've invested fairly heavily over the last few years in standby generation capacity at both of our drinking water treatment plants. So we've got over three and a half megawatts of standby diesel generation capacity at our Lake Murray Water Treatment Plant and our Canal Water Treatment Plant. We can treat water and distribute water with our generator power, same quantities capacities as we could on line power from Dominion. So we've got full redundancy there. We've got adequate diesel fuel supply. Anytime we see a storm coming, whether or not it's a hurricane weather event or a predicted ice storm, we top off our fuel supply so that we can run several weeks without power if need be. Same with our treating compounds. Our regulations require us to have space for 30 days of storage of our treating compounds. We don't always have a 30-day supply on hand, but we've got space for that. If there's a predicted storm coming, we're sure to top that off. So we've got kind of a standard playbook that we follow that is part of our emergency response plan that helps us be prepared for what's coming. And we feel pretty confident in those measures. So the other thing, the leaks, you know, just making sure that you're able to respond and respond quickly. We've got our team of folks. We've also got contracts with local contractors that can help us respond to major leaks should they occur as well. An industry term that a lot of people might not know is risk and resiliency. Could you talk about what risk and resiliency is and why it's important to Columbia Watered customers? So in 2018, EPA passed a regulation. It was part of the American Water Infrastructure Act. And it required all major water utilities to conduct a risk and resiliency assessment. So basically, what are the threats to your utility and then develop an action plan of what are you going to do about it? How are you going to address those threats? So it was a very methodical systematic process of evaluating, okay, where might your weak points be and then help you develop a plan to address those weak points. We look at our emergency response plan every year, but the last time that this type of study was required by the federal government was after 9-11 in 2001. There were something called vulnerability assessments that each of the major utilities had to do. We participated in that at that time. Again, we look every year, but this was a much more methodical systematic process of looking at our key vulnerabilities. So we recently completed that work. We had a consultant help us so that we weren't just looking ourselves. We weren't an independent review of what we were doing. And so we hired a consultant to look at that as well. We identified three key areas that are probably common to most utilities. The first was physical security. Our facilities are gated. We have cameras. We have door lock protections. We also have security guards that are armed at our facilities. So we've got a lot of physical security in place. There are a few tweaks that we need to make to address that. As you can imagine, cybersecurity was a big part of it and making sure that you've got a cybersecurity team that we're doing some of those things that I mentioned before that made us different than the utility in Florida. And then finally, a big threat to us that was high on our radar screen after the flooding in October of 2015 was water supply resiliency, particularly here at Canal, making sure that we've got a resilient supply of drinking water that we can treat and distribute to our customers. So that was also another finding that came out of our risk and resiliency assessment. Last October marked five years since the historic flood. Where does the city of Columbia stand with repairs to the downtown canal now? Great question. We get asked that often because it has been a while. It's been a minute since 2015. It's something that we work on every day and we apply steady pressure to try to make progress every day. Here at the canal, we've taken a three-prong approach to try to build things back and put us in a better position than we were in October of 2015. We want to be stronger than we were in October of 2015. So the first one is simply building back the section of canal that was breached and strengthening that part of the canal and getting the hydroelectric generating station back, producing good green power that our community needs. So we've reached agreement with FEMA. It's about a $42 million settlement to do that work. So big dollars, heavy civil works project. We're in the environmental assessment and permitting phase of that work right now and that's progressing fairly nicely and working really well with FEMA. And so that's moving forward. We're probably three to four years out from having the canal dike rebuilt and the hydroelectric generating station back operating. But we're closer. We're closer than we were. It took a long time to reach this agreement. We feel like we've got a fair agreement with FEMA and the government and so we're excited about moving forward with that. We're also addressing the issue at the front end of the canal, at the mouth, the intake to the canal system up on the Broad River. And we're replacing all 12 head gates that allow water to flow into our canal system and new and more modern head gates. And that is being funded through a community development block grant mitigation program. So that's about $8 million of construction funding and that's some of the first work that will happen. It's the design is well underway. The funding has been secured for the construction so we're excited about that moving forward. That'll give us a little better inlet control of what's coming into the canal. And then finally I talked about being more resilient and being in a better position. The city is funding through our capital project fund to construct an alternate drinking water supply intake on the Broad River. That was one of our emergency measures that we implemented in October of 2015. Very quickly we put pumps along Riverfront Park that drew water directly out of the Broad River and sent it to our treatment plant. We're thinking more permanent intake and pump station that if God forbid something did happen to our canal system we would still be able to withdraw water directly out of the Broad River, send it to our treatment plant and our customers wouldn't know the difference. That's a project that's estimated at $45 million. We're self-funding the design. We've applied for a FEMA resiliency grant. We'll find out in June whether or not we were successful. Certainly if we get that grant funding that project will accelerate. We're committed to doing that work regardless even if we have to fund it ourselves. But we're really, really hopeful, very positive that we're going to get some good feedback and be a recipient of that resiliency grant. So those are the three things that really the three pronged approach that we're taking to repairing the canal and building it back better than we were in October of 2015. The other things that we've done in the distribution system we found some weak points in October of 2015. We had a lot of exposed pipe crossing streams and when flood waters come through sometimes debris impacts those pipes and it washed away and that's the reason that we lost pressure in some of our zones in the system and really one of the main reasons we had a boil water advisory in our system. So we've been systematically doing horizontal directional drilling to put our infrastructure underneath streams and creeks and so that's a much more secure way to go about doing that and a modern way to go about doing that and we feel really good about that and FEMA has helped us fund a lot of that work. So a few of those projects are still ongoing most have been completed. What other steps has Columbia Water taken to secure the city's drinking water supply since the flood of 2015? Well I mentioned those directional drills that is a big part of what we've been doing and a big part of what we've learned. We've also been investigating and working toward greater interconnection between our two water systems. They're interconnected now. The water that comes out of Lake Murray and has produced our Lake Murray water plant and distributed from there is essentially the same quality as what we take from the Broad River Canal and treat here at the Columbia Canal and distribute to our downtown customers. But greater interconnectivity so that if we wouldn't have problem in one area of the system we can move water to another area is important and so we're studying that we're strengthening those interconnections strategically as we move forward so I think that's important as well. We've invested in storage facilities out in our distribution system that help us if we were to have a supply interruption that would help us. Many may have seen the tankage that is being built here at the canal treatment facility so we're increasing our finish water storage here as well. So a lot of work and a lot of heavy investment going into helping us be stronger than we were in 2015. What measures will the wastewater treatment plant off of I-77 take to protect the city's wastewater infrastructure since being impacted by the historic flood? We don't want to forget about our other facility off of Simon Tree Lane right off of Interstate 77 the largest wastewater treatment plant in the state and so if you recall that area was almost an island during 2015 access was a big issue we had folks stay in there around the clock because getting in and out was a big deal. We've secured some additional property we've got another entrance now to a higher ground so that's going to be helpful to us and the God forbid something like 2015 that magnitude were to happen again we've looked at strengthening the dikes that protect that area as well we've got a study going on now that's been funded by FEMA to look at some additional dike protection for the facility but again the procedures are in place there for topping off treating compounds that operate as needed we also have some generators that are being funded through a FEMA grant as part of the flood recovery and so we're going to be installing some generation capacity there we've got really good redundant feed from Dominion Power already at our treatment facility but having some generator backup capacity is important as well so that's under design and going to be implemented in the very near future. Thank you for your time today Mr. Shealy again I'm Mimi Draft and we just want to thank you for talking to our customers and our citizens about what we do to keep Columbia water safer citizens and residents throughout the city Thanks so much really important topic and great questions and we just want to assure our customers that we're doing everything we can to protect our critical assets to protect our water quality and protect the environment on the wastewater side