Michael Arendt has spent his career on the water. After working his way up from deckhand to riverboat captain in the United States Merchant Navy, he came ashore in 2001 to work as a lock and dam operator for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He now guides boats carrying everything from rocks to missiles through Alabama’s Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which connects Tennessee and Alabama to the Gulf of Mexico.
Arendt enjoys the job and views lock and dam operators as a critical part of America’s transportation infrastructure and national security. So in the mid-2000s, he joined a campaign to stop the Corps of Engineers from outsourcing jobs like his to contractors, which led to the U.S. Congress passing a law requiring work to remain with federal employees. It’s also why Arendt is now speaking out again, protesting Corps of Engineers plans to remotely manage 13 locks and hydroelectric dams in the Southeast, replacing on-site staff with workers who operate them remotely from a central office.
Arendt’s own facility is not on that list for now, but he fears the plan will make U.S. infrastructure and waterways less safe and more vulnerable to cyberattacks. “It’s important in all of these systems to have eyes and ears on the waterfront,” said Arendt, who is an officer with the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) union. He recalls an incident where a barge passenger fell overboard in winter and Arendt helped him back ashore, something an outside operator could not do.
“I don’t know if they’ll be able to see this kind of thing when there’s so much more going on,” Arendt says. On-site workers like him use cameras to monitor dams and sluices, but also go in circles. Remote operators will also use cameras, but will have to monitor multiple facilities at once and will not be able to go outside in an emergency or for a look in bad weather.
The Corps of Engineers plans to centralize operation of its 13 facilities by the end of 2023, adding to the roles of many others the organization already operates in that manner. The locks and weirs are currently manned 24/7 by 29 people. That number will drop to 12 once the remote operations plan is complete, with each operator overseeing multiple dams. The project’s first dams came online this summer, when workers began operating the Jim Woodruff hydroelectric dam and lock on the Florida-Georgia border from 80 miles away in Fort Gaines, Georgia.
Bringing more dams online is intended to reduce labor costs, according to emails from the Corps of Engineers’ South Atlantic Division sent in response to questions from WIRED. By doing so, it hopes to allay concerns about prices from hydropower customers, the emails said, while also claiming that automation and improved systems installed at the centralized hub will improve reliability and reduce power outages. Operators are being offered retraining for various on-site jobs, but the Corps of Engineers has not yet worked out the details.
The IFPTE says the plan not only destroys jobs and harms waterfront safety, but could also open vital U.S. transportation and energy infrastructure to cybersecurity threats. State-backed attackers from around the world have developed software that can attack critical infrastructure control systems. Russian government hackers caused notorious blackouts in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2015 and 2016, attacks that investigators say should be classed as war crimes. And in 2013, an Iranian hacker reportedly attacked a small, 20-foot-tall dam in New York’s Westchester County, gaining access to information including water levels and the status of the dam’s sluice gate, which opens and closes. to control the flow and water level. .
That attacker could have remotely operated the floodgate, according to a 2016 U.S. Justice Department indictment, had the dam not been offline for repairs at the time. It’s unclear why such a small facility would have been targeted, but the incident shows that cyber-attacks on dams are not just a theoretical threat. “It’s a nightmare coming up,” says Arendt. “It needs to be secured.”
