By Charlotte Lane: West Virginia Public Service Commission
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.