What if attackers poison a city's water-treatment system?
A SCADA water-poisoning breach is a localized public-safety event — terrifying headline, minimal market footprint; the +6.5% VIX is wildly oversized for a single utility. Rhymes with the 2021 Oldsmar, FL water-plant intrusion, which moved nothing in markets. Only a coordinated multi-city campaign with state attribution would justify the risk-off; absent that, fade the vol.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Attackers breach SCADA at a metropolitan water utility and alter chemical dosing, forcing emergency do-not-drink orders. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.