All tabletop exercises
OT / ICS·Intermediate·Executive audience
Someone raises the chemical dose at a town’s water plant
The prompt — read this to the room
You run a municipal water utility serving 38,000 people. At 11:05 an operator watches the cursor move across the SCADA screen on its own and raise the sodium hydroxide dosing setpoint from 90 to 5,400 parts per million. He resets it within a minute, and downstream pH alarms would have caught it before treated water reached a tap. The workstation runs remote-access software installed years ago so the on-call operator could work from home. The mayor’s office has already heard about it from a council member. Do you tell the public, and what do you say?
Total duration
2 h
People to involve
6
Best fit
Public, Utilities
Who to involve
Most important first.
- CEO / Managing director
- OT / plant engineer
- CISO / Head of security
- Communications / PR
- Legal counsel
- Board member
What it tests
- Decide what the utility tells the public, regulators and elected officials, and when.
- Confirm water safety with evidence before making any public reassurance.
- Remove the remote-access path without losing the ability to run the plant.
- Assign who speaks for the utility and keep that voice consistent with the facts.
Outline of activities
- 1The operator’s report and the immediate safety check
- 2Notifications: state drinking-water program, federal partners, elected officials
- 3Public statement: what is known, what is safe, what is being done
- 4Closing the remote-access hole and staffing the plant differently
- 5Briefing the governing board and committing to fixes
Run sheet (Pro)
The facilitator's timeline of execution, the detailed steps for running the session and the questions to ask each person.
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