Problems and Prospects of New York City Water Reservoir

Problems and Prospects of New York City water reservoir

The majorities New Yorkers go about their days using water to bathe, make tea, clean their hands or flush the bathroom without much thought to where it comes from. Nevertheless behind every drop of water is a journey that can start one hundred and twenty five miles away in upstate New York.

Along the way, it gets sterilized by ultraviolet light, treated with chlorine, fluoridated as well as tested for cleanness. It travels through mountains as well as deep valleys and, once in the city, flows underground in tunnels as well as into distribution chambers. A billion gallons of water are delivered as well as consumed every day, with gravity alone being adequate to drive it into buildings at least 6 stories high.

Before it goes anywhere, the city's drinking water starts out in three main watersheds the Delaware as well as Catskill systems west of the Hudson River as well as the Croton system just north of the city. Whereas the Catskill/Delaware systems provide roughly ninety percent of New York City's water, nearly ten percent comes from the Croton system. The watersheds feed more than a dozen reservoirs as well as controlled lakes. The biggest reservoir, the Pepacton, has a volume of more than 140 billion gallons. The Ashokan in Ulster County, pictured, has a volume of 128 billion gallons.

The water supply is so significant to the city that a devoted police force with more than 200 members works 24 hours a day to stop unlawful dumping as well as other misuses of the waterways. In Hurricane Irene, the DEP Police were even called on to carry out water rescues.

However over the years, the residents in a neighborhood of the small upstate town of Wawarsing, situated over the aqueduct, began to notice something strange at whatever time it rained, roads backed up, basements flooded.

Longtime occupant David Sickles had to move his electrical panels to the upper limit of his basement so that they would not short out. Ed Jennings, who lived in the neighborhood for more than fifty years, said the problem gradually got worse over the years.

"When we bought the house there was a little bit of water on the floor," Jennings recalled. "And then, as the years went on, then it got more and more and more and more. And it lastly came up to about four feet. Several times a year. It was not four feet of water all the time.”

At first, the inhabitants did not even consider that there could be a problem with the aqueduct.

They just thought there was a lot of water in the area according to Jennings a resident of New York City. And New York City officials denied that the town’s flooding was connected to the aqueduct. “The city always said no, it was not leaking. It was not the tunnel leaking,” remembered Jennings.

Nevertheless the Delaware Aqueduct was leaking, and not just in the town of Wawarsing. In the town of Newburgh, thirty five miles southeast, residents thought that a stream bubbling out of wetlands was a natural artesian well. In actuality, the water was coming out of a 36-square-foot tunnel carved out by the force of water blasting from a crack in the aqueduct buried 650 feet underground. Combined with the leak in Wawarsing, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection admitted in the early 1990s that the aqueduct was leaking at a rate of up to 35 million gallons a day. That’s adequate water to supply almost half a million people a day.

More than waste

However while the aqueduct is wasting twice the quantity every day that the UCLA water main break did in its entirety, the waste isn’t what worries Bill Wegner, the personnel scientist at Riverkeeper, a watchdog group that monitors the health of the watersheds that feed New York City.

"Worst-case scenario is you'd have a catastrophic failure,” he said. "If the tunnel, which is under pressure, were to collapse, the whole aqueduct would have to be shut down. Fifty percent of the city’s water supply would cease to exist."

A 2001 report published by Riverkeeper concluded that New York City’s reservoirs would run out of water in just eighty days.

"If you do the math and figure out that the city's going to be hurting for water for fifty percent of its consumers, it is really a catastrophic event," Wegner said.

And the city would be out of water for