Mountain Water for a City - Stroud Water Research Center

Mountain Water for a City
Mountain Water for a City
A chronicle of New York City’s battle to find
and maintain one of the most envied water
supplies in the world – and the Stroud
Water Research Center’s involvement in
monitoring the threatened watersheds.
By David Yeats-Thomas
A publication of Blaine Associates
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania
On-site photography by David Yeats-Thomas
SPONSORED
BY THE
STROUD FOUNDATION
Contents
1. Water Empire at Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Working with the Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Water, Potable and Plentiful. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4. A Long First Summer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5. Into the Catskill Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
6. Spiraling the Esopus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7. Plumbing the Ashokan Depths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8. Boosting Morale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
9. Fossil Forests of the Schoharie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
10. Rondout & Neversink, Stormy Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
11. Pepacton, the Delaware Giant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
12. Cannonsville, Last of the Giants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
13. Out of Sight, Out of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
14. New Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
15. Zooming In. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Appendix, the reservoirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
1
Water Empire at Crossroads
– to the water that ran from the pristine mountain streams
one hundred miles north of the city. In the process the city
broke new engineering ground as it built the world’s
biggest dams and longest aqueducts of the time. The construction phase lasted from 1835 until 1967. Thousands of
workers died on the job, and more than 10,000 people were
uprooted from their homes, farms and businesses to make
way for the reservoirs. Not even the dead were spared as
thousands of bodies were dug from the cemeteries and reinterred on higher ground. Nineteen reservoirs were built,
scattered over two thousand square miles of rugged land. A
400-mile network of seven aqueducts – one of which is
still the longest in the world – connected the reservoirs to
each other and to the city.
Few believe that New York City would have grown
into the nation’s – and the world’s – financial center if it
had failed to find an abundant and reliable source of clean
drinking water.
“Basically, New Yorkers are drinking mountain water,”
Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history at Columbia
University, said at the January 7, 2001 opening of an exhibition of photographs, drawings and artifacts of the construction period. “It’s the best water system that any people
has built since the Romans 2000 years ago.” (The New
York Times, January 8, 2001.)
T
he spring of the year 2000 was a watershed season
for the Stroud Water Research Center. For that was
when the Center took on an immense job that
would test the breadth and depth of its research skills as no
other project has done since its founding in 1966.
The center’s mission was to monitor the streams and
reservoirs of the vast watersheds from which New York
City draws its water. The timeline: six years.
The story of how New York City built one of the
world’s most-envied public water supply systems reads like
a spicy historical novel. Byzantine political intrigue and
corruption weaves through the narrative as men made fortunes on unmet commitments to provide water.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers died by the thousands from
water-borne disease epidemics, and vast sections of the city
were lost to fires that could not be controlled because of a
lack of water. Along the way a Founding Father and a
United States vice president fought a duel to the death. Nor
was love and scandal a stranger to a plot that saw one of
the earliest city reservoirs nicknamed after a notorious
society courtesan with high connections.
Somehow, out of this turmoil emerged the water system that brought the “champagne of drinking water” to city
residents’ taps. The city council did this by claiming title –
some would say by riding roughshod over the landowners
1
Responsibility for managing the city’s vast
water empire belongs to the 6,000-employee
Department of Environmental Protection
(N.Y.C.D.E.P.) – formerly the Board of Water
Supply – that includes a police force which patrols
the watersheds. Aside from the reservoirs and aqueducts, the N.Y.C.D.E.P. maintains six thousand
miles of water mains (half of which were installed
before 1930) and another six thousands miles of
sewer lines. Some 1.3 billion gallons of water are
consumed daily by about 7.3 million city residents
and another million-plus upstate residents who tap
into the system.
When the city finished its dam-building phase
in 1967, its sole focus became running its huge
water empire, confident in the quality and abundance of the water. Overconfident was one popular
view a decade ago, when the bubble burst and the
city found the much-vaunted quality of its water
supply under threat. Other critics suggest the problem had to do with the antiquated water regulations
that included provisions for “two seat privies.”
Possibly it was a bit of both, exacerbated by its
failure to reorient its century-long goal of increasing quantity to focusing on quality.
In any case, the wake-up call came in 1989
when the federal Environmental Protection Agency
(E.P.A.) found increasing levels of contamination
in the city’s drinking water. The E.P.A. gave the
city until 1993 to produce a plan to protect the
watersheds or face the enormous costs of building
what would be the world’s largest filtration plant –
estimates go as high as $8 billion. New York is one
of only a handful of large cities in the United States
that doesn’t filter its water for microbial pathogens.
Instead, it relies on its once pristine watershed to
do the job.
After letting the watershed residents do pretty
much as they pleased for decades, the city suddenly
started to tighten up and enforce watershed regulations. It also came up with a plan to buy more land
around the streams and reservoirs. The E.P.A. gave
the city three years to put the plan into action. This
time the residents and developers dug in their
heels, sparking a bitter battle that went on for
years.
Times had changed since the reservoir-building
days. New York City no longer had the political
power to just move in and take property at will in
watersheds outside the city limits. The city was
forced to sit down and negotiate terms with the
towns, counties, farmers, developers and environmental organizations. The state brokered the talks
with Governor George Pataki in the chair, as the
E.P.A. hovered expectantly over the proceedings.
In the meantime, as will be explained later in
this chronicle, the city had agreed to build a filtration plant for the Croton system, east of the
Hudson, for under $1 billion. With asphalt parking
lots and fertilized lawns encroaching on the woodlands of the eastern watershed, the streams and
wetlands, which served as the natural biological filters, were no longer able to keep up. Many of the
reservoirs here were overloaded with nutrients
from runoff as well as from the discharge of
sewage treatment plants. Fortunately for the city,
the 12 Croton system reservoirs east of the Hudson
provided only 10 percent of its water supply.
The other 90 percent comes from the six reservoirs west of the Hudson, and the city was prepared to go to great lengths to protect this absolutely critical resource, and still avoid the high cost of
a filtration plant. As it turned out the city would
have to spend more than a billion dollars to make a
deal that was hammered out over several years of
negotiations. On January 21, 1997 the city signed
the 1,500-page Memorandum of Agreement with
70 watershed municipalities and five environmental
organizations, the state and E.P.A.
The agreement was widely hailed as one of the
most important milestones in the history of
American water management treatment.
Most important for the city, the agreement
gave it five years to show that its water agency
could manage the watershed effectively enough to
avoid filtration.
For the watershed communities, the agreement
provided funds to upgrade sewage systems, help
farmers with better land-management practices and
support economic development in the Catskills.
Equally critical for the upstate communities,
the agreement ensured that the city could buy environmentally sensitive land along streams and reservoirs at fair market prices if – and only if – the
owners were willing to sell.
The rate increases to the users of the water
2
would be quite low. A typical city water bill of $400 a year
would go up to about $435 by the year 2002.
While some environmental organizations expressed concerns about a few details of the foot-thick document, the signatories went away happy.
“It’s going to save the city literally billions of dollars,”
Governor Pataki said at the time. “But it’s going to allow a
quarter of a million people who live in the watershed communities to have certainty as to what can be developed and how it
can be developed.’’ (The New York Times, January 22, 1997.)
The National Research Council, which was asked by the
city to conduct a scientific evaluation of the agreement’s watershed management program, put it more objectively:
“The principal goal of the Memorandum of Agreement is to
protect public health in the City of New York by providing the
City with safe, potable water while at the same time protecting
the rights and needs of the residents of the watershed.”
In a sense the agreement was a peace agreement between
the city and the watersheds after more than a hundred years of
hostility. But as The New York Times observed later that year,
the “plan depends on a fragile political alliance between rural
upstate communities and New York City that can be upset at
any time.”
For the agreement also set in place the first set of watershed regulations since 1953. “The new rules deal with a range
of modern-day threats to clean water: everything from proliferating weekend homes and their septic fields to the possibilities
of casinos in the Catskills.” (Times, August 31, 1997.)
The bottom line is that the city D.E.P.’s watershed management must beef up protection of the land and natural resources,
help communities deal with the extra restrictions on their land
and constantly monitor all aspects of the plan. It’s a massive
undertaking that if it is successful, could become a template for
watershed management, according to the National Research
Council’s (N.R.C.) 427-page report and evaluation of the agreement.
While the N.R.C. praised the agreement in general and the
city D.E.P.’s watershed management, it did suggest some
improvements to the water quality monitoring program.
In particular the N.R.C. felt improvements could be made
in what it called “performance monitoring,” which evaluates the
effectiveness of watershed management practices for reducing
nonpoint source pollution such as in manure-laden water runoff
from dairy farms.
It was concerns such as this that led Hudson Riverkeeper
attorney Robert F. Kennedy, one of the leading parties and signatories of the Memorandum of Agreement, to suggest that the
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
(D.E.C.) consider involving the Stroud Water Research Center.
That, in a nutshell, is the background to the Stroud Center’s
New York project – a job that was to involve a major commitment by all sections of the southeastern Pennsylvania-based
research laboratory as never before.
The city reached out to the pristine Catskill Mountain streams
for an abundant and reliable source of clean drinking water.
3
2
Working With the Empire
B
ack on October 10, 1999, Bernard Sweeney
wasn’t sure Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was even
listening to him as they ate lunch together in
the Stroud Center library.
“I was trying to explain what we at Stroud were
doing,” Sweeney reminisced more than a year later.
Kennedy gave no indication he was interested. He was
visiting the center as the keynote speaker for the opening of the Stroud Center’s new streamhouse, a greenhouse conservatory through which artificial streams
flow.
A few days after his visit he called back. “Could
you come up to Pace?” he asked Bern Sweeney. He
was referring to Pace University where Riverkeeper,
an environmental organization devoted to protecting
waterways, has offices.
In preparation for the visit, Kennedy sent a little
homework – the National Research Council’s 427-page
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, opening the Stroud Center’s Streamhouse in 1999 with
Center Director Bernard Sweeney.
report and assessment of the New York City Watershed
Memorandum of Agreement. Riverkeeper had been an
too eggs worth $1.5 million from Australia into the United
active participant in the negotiations and signing of the historic
States, where his company, Hudson Valley Aviaries, hatched the
agreement. As Riverkeeper’s chief prosecuting attorney,
eggs and sold the young birds.
Kennedy had played a leading role in more than four years of
Kennedy, who had himself been in trouble with the law
often-tense, make-or-break negotiations.
over drug possession, wanted to give Wegner a second chance.
Before Sweeney went up to Pace, Kennedy sent
“Where would any of us be if we didn’t get a second
Riverkeeper’s newly appointed staff scientist, Bill Wegner, to
chance?” Kennedy asked in a New York Times interview at the
the Stroud Center, where he was given a tour and a slide prestime. He hired Wegner in the face of bitter opposition from
entation on the center’s activities.
environmentalists in and outside Riverkeeper who saw the forThat was December 2, 1999. Though Sweeney was not
mer bird smuggler as an environmental criminal.
aware of it at the time, Mr. Wegner was at the center of a conThe resulting uproar raged inside Riverkeeper through the
troversy at Riverkeeper that was to seriously split the leadership
first half of 2000 and ended in the resignation of the organizaof the organization credited with playing a leading role in
tion’s founder and president John Boyle, among others.
bringing the Hudson River back to life. The storm was over
Riverkeeper reorganized, and its new president, Richard
Kennedy’s hiring of Wegner in the fall of 1999, soon after the
Knabel, had this to say in the organization’s fall 2000 newsletlatter had been released from prison. He had been convicted
ter:
under wildlife-protection laws for smuggling some 800 cocka-
5
“While the transition regrettably got a bit messy – namely
the unfortunate departure of Bob Boyle, the organization’s
founder – the end result is an organization that is stronger as a
whole and more prepared than at any time in it history.”
On December 15 Bern Sweeney traveled to Pace to give
Bobby Kennedy a slide presentation on the innovative methods
Stroud uses in monitoring watersheds.
Impressed, Bobby Kennedy asked Bern Sweeney if he
would be willing to give the same presentation to New York
State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Sweeney
agreed and Kennedy immediately called both the D.E.C. commissioner and the E.P.A. regional chief to set up appointments.
Seven days later, on December 22, Sweeney was at
D.E.C.’s offices in New Paltz, in upstate New York. His audience included the D.E.C. commissioner, John P. Cahill, other
senior department officials, a few officers from the E.P.A. and
Kennedy.
It was during the question-and-answer session after the
presentation that Sweeney first realized where this was all
heading – and that the people in the room were not just picking
his brain. They were seriously thinking about getting the Stroud
Center involved.
A whirlwind series of meetings followed.
On January 6, 2000, Sweeney drove to Albany for another
meeting with D.E.C. This time senior officers of New York
City’s Department of Environmental Protection were also present. And for the first time Sweeney was to feel the tension the
Stroud Center would face in its dealings with senior officials of
this huge bureaucracy.
The officials at the meeting, said Sweeney, were “very
defensive.”
“Every time I said something, one of them would dismiss
it with, ‘We’ve studied that, or that’s not relevant!’”
A week later, on January 25, Sweeney went to Manhattan
to give his presentation to Jean Fox, then E.P.A.’s regional
director. Also present were officials from the state D.E.C. and
Riverkeeper.
“We had a very positive reaction, and they encouraged us
to go ahead and put in a written proposal – which we did,” he
said.
The Stroud Center proposed a six-year study starting in the
year 2000 and divided into two three-year phases. Phase I
would establish 60 stream sampling stations distributed over
2,000 square miles of watersheds. Fifty of these sampling stations would be on sites well upstream of the reservoirs, often in
smaller tributaries. These would be called “targeted” sites. The
remaining 10, the so called “integrated” stations, would be sited
on main feeder streams close to the reservoirs. Eight main
reservoirs would also be studied. All selected sites would be
sampled annually for three years.
Starting in 2003, Phase II would establish 50 new stream
sampling stations – of which 40 would be “targeted” and ten
would be “integrated” sites. Phase II would include six new
reservoir studies. Some of the Phase I stations would continue
to be studied during Phase II to give the overall project perspective and continuity. As in Phase I, all stations and reservoirs would be studied annually over the second three-year
period.
H ORNETS ’
NEST
Sweeney stressed both in the proposal and repeatedly in his
presentations to state and city officials that the Stroud project
was designed to complement existing monitoring by both
D.E.P. and D.E.C.
Four days after the meeting with E.P.A., Sweeney returned
to the city to give his presentation to the New York Watershed
Protection Partnership Council. The council – made up of representatives of the many parties to the Memorandum of
Agreement – monitors progress of the agreement and resolves
disputes that arise. Its members asked Sweeney many questions
and showed positive interest.
But there was nothing positive about the next meeting,
which Sweeney described as a “hornets’ nest.”
Told that the meeting had been called to answer “questions
and concerns” that the city’s D.E.P. had about the Stroud proposal, Sweeney immediately found himself bombarded with
hostile questions.
The D.E.P. officials at the meeting had a terrible attitude,
Sweeney said, adding, “There was not one element of our proposal that they didn’t knock down. When you have 10 to 15
people tearing at you, you don’t have a moment to think and
gather your thoughts.”
Nothing seemed to assuage their collective hostility.
Sweeney repeated the assurances spelled out in the proposal
that the Stroud program was designed to complement the existing programs of both the state and city environmental agencies.
They seemed unimpressed.
Sweeney, who had come alone, left the meeting reeling. He
promised himself he would bring support when he returned.
Obviously D.E.P. was uncomfortable with the state’s proposal
to bring in an outside, independent watershed research organization.
Big bureaucracy
New York City D.E.P. is massive, its statistics mind-bog-
6
gling. To an outsider the organization appears to operate more
like an independent government than a city department. With an
annual capital budget of $2.9 billion, D.E.P. spends 30 percent
of the city’s total construction budget.
The department even has its own police force that patrols a
vast domain spread across eight counties that cover 2,000
square miles in two major watersheds. In addition to the reservoirs, the department maintains 6,000 miles of water mains and
400 miles of aqueducts and tunnels.
What comes in must go out. Also under the eye of D.E.P.,
about 1.3 gallons of wastewater a day leave via a system of
6,600 miles of sewers, 14 treatment plants and the Atlantic
Ocean.
And, says D.E.P. commissioner Joel A. Miele Sr., “D.E.P.
manages an exhaustive and very sophisticated water quality
monitoring and testing program. We analyze water from the
source: 19 reservoirs in eight upstate counties; at the tap; and,
after it has been used, at the point of the treated wastewater’s
discharge.”
So, the question arises, what can the Stroud Center, whose
offices and labs could fit into one of D.E.P.’s reservoir gatehouses, do to help an agency with such vast resources?
F OCUSED
ON ECOSYSTEMS
Sweeney said he and his staff studied the existing monitoring before making their proposal, which they feel complements
the existing system.
“Our approach is trying to understand present circumstances,” said Sweeney. If the ecosystem is not working properly, Stroud wants to find out why. In the New York project,
Stroud proposed to study methods that are not included in typical monitoring programs.
Some of Stroud’s approaches have raised eyebrows, said
Sweeney. “We have taken existing tools and used them in a different fashion – at a different time of year,” Sweeney said, noting for instance that Stroud may sample the streams in early
spring, whereas typically agencies such as the city D.E.P. would
do it in the summer.
“We have a plan and we’re following it. We should just let
our data speak for themselves.”
The city D.E.P. looks at monitoring mainly from a water
quality standpoint. That is, it checks the water for anything that
could directly affect human health – chemicals and pathogens
such as bacteria, viruses and protozoa. Stroud looks at the bigger picture – at the condition of the entire ecosystem and its
components, in addition to the chemistry and microbiology of
the water. It does this by studying the quality and quantity of
Covered bridge on the Delaware West Branch.
plant, animal and microbial life in the streams and reservoirs.
“We are not trying to discredit [D.E.P.’s] program. We are
trying to complement their work. We’re going to great pains to
steer away from any work they are already doing. That’s the
spirit of the program. It’s called complementary monitoring. I
don’t want to waste our time or their money doing anything
else.”
S KEPTICAL
FARMERS
Sweeney encountered another group that was skeptical
about the project when he presented the Stroud plan to officials
at Delhi (pronounced dell-high), the county seat of the largely
farming community of Delaware County, New York, site of the
Pepacton and Cannonsville reservoirs.
The officials had reason to be wary of anything to do with
New York City’s water system. Most of those at the meeting
had experienced first-hand the trauma of being forcefully
uprooted from homes, farms and businesses to make way for
the reservoirs. Under the law of eminent domain, the city had
acquired a total of 33,286 acres for the two reservoirs. During
7
the construction period, which started just after World War II
and ended in 1967, nearly 2,000 residents had been forced to
move, and more than 5,000 graves had been dug up and the
human remains reinterred elsewhere. The river valleys the
reservoirs drowned were some of the most fertile flatlands in an
area of hills and mountains.
The years have done little to ease the bitterness.
On top of this, the region is economically depressed and
one of the poorest in the state. County officials were understandably concerned that the $1.2-million-a-year cost of the
Stroud project was being taken away from their watershed management programs. But Sweeney and state officials assured
them that funding for the Stroud project was from totally separate state sources and the federal government.
S UPPORT
stream sampling stations planned over nearly 2,000 square
miles of watersheds
On April 17, with the leaf buds already popping, he hit the
road on his first full reconnaissance trip to the East-of-Hudson
watershed, which is dominated by the New Croton Reservoir.
The Croton System of 12 reservoirs and three controlled lakes
is scattered over Westchester and Putnam counties.
A week later, Sweeney drove up to the West-of-Hudson
watersheds on Wednesday night, April 26, for his second reconnaissance – a particularly hectic two days that he now jokingly
refers to as his “infamous trip.”
It wasn’t so funny at the time. He started out at 5 a.m. the
next day in the area of the Cannonsville, the westernmost reservoir of the city’s water system. From the village of Walton he
wound his way up the West Branch of the Delaware River,
making side trips along the major tributaries.
His aim was to earmark sampling stations that range in
quality from almost pristine to poor. He waded into the streams
and picked up rocks and looked at the aquatic insect and plant
life. He made sure the site was accessible to the field workers
and their equipment, which is often cumbersome and heavy.
When he could, he also stopped to talk with landowners to
gauge how they would feel about fieldworkers crossing their
land.
“Most of those I talked to were positive about letting us in.
Some weren’t.”
From Cannonsville he drove across the mountain passes to
the East Branch of the Delaware, which feeds the Pepacton
Reservoir. Still moving more or less in an easterly direction,
Sweeney cut across to the Neversink and Rondout reservoirs
and their feeder streams and tributaries.
Several mountain passes later he found himself in the basin
of the Ashokan Reservoir, oldest of the West-of-Hudson dams.
From Ashokan and its popular trout fishing Esopus River,
Sweeney drove to the northernmost of the Catskills dams, the
Schoharie Reservoir, and its namesake feeder, the only stream
of the system that flows north – into the Mohawk River.
He also scouted out convenient, centrally located lodging
where the staff could be based while they were in the field.
On Friday, Sweeney continued working until nightfall.
“That was the infamous day. I drove home that night. At the
Valley Forge exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike the car died
about 10 feet from the toll booth. The toll booth guy called a
tow truck, which would only pull my car through the toll booth
– and that cost $50. Then I had to get another tow truck to tow
me to Avondale. I arrived at 5 a.m.”
CREW
Three days after the Delhi meeting, Sweeney was back in
the D.E.P. hornets' nest. “By now it was clear that D.E.C. was
going to fund our project,” said Sweeney. “We knew it and
were convinced of it, but the New York City D.E.P. was still
confident that they could delay it or otherwise prevent it from
happening.”
This time Sweeney took along Stroud scientists Lou
Kaplan and Laurel Standley for support.
“The tone was the same [as at the previous meeting], but it
was an easier meeting for me because the arguing could be
spread around, and one had more time to regroup between
issues.”
Still, D.E.P.’s attitude seemed to crystallize in the remark of
one official who said, “There is nothing in your proposal that
we see of value.”
A week later, on March 30, Sweeney was back in New
York State to address the Westchester County Planning
Department, in whose territory lie many of the original reservoirs east of the Hudson. The meeting turned out to be “very
productive.”
“They were willing to cooperate and they were positive,”
said Sweeney.
G REEN
LIGHT
&
RECONNAISSANCE
Official approval by New York state government finally
came in March, with April 1 set as the starting date. This left
little time to set up the logistics of such a large project.
First came reconnaissance. Sweeney had to cover hundreds
of miles of twisty back roads to choose the sites for the 60
8
R EADY
TO ROLL , BUT
...
Stroud was now ready to start the field work. But as it
turned out, the bureaucrats were not ready to give Stroud the
green light to send in the troops.
The E.P.A.’s quality assurance officer was quibbling
about certain aspects of the project. One was the mass spectrometer, a sophisticated instrument that can identify the type
of molecules present in a water sample. He said Stroud’s was
too old. “We told him we had bought a new instrument. He
came back with, ‘but you haven’t tested it yet.’”
And so it went.
“I was beginning to feel that this was a plot to stop us
from getting into the field,” said Sweeney.
Fortunately, he had managed to get the officials to allow
Main street of Delhi, the government seat of Delaware County, N.Y.
in the entomologists – staff scientist John Jackson and his
“bug crew” — because the macroinvertebrate sampling must
be done in the spring, before the tiny larvae metamorphose into
adults.
Finally, after more diplomatic wrangling and waiting for
the red tape to unravel, approval was reluctantly given and the
rest of the Stroud crews took to the road, the fields and the
streams of the sprawling watersheds.
But the delay did give Stroud researchers a chance to brush
up on the fascinating history of why and how an island city that
is surrounded by water was forced to venture far inland to find
an adequate supply of clean fresh water.
9
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3
Water, Potable and Plentiful
October 14, 1842. Dominating the picture are a magnificent
fountain that shoots up almost as high as the City Hall spire and
a team of six high-stepping horses pulling a fire engine.
New Yorkers were celebrating something today’s city
dwellers take for granted: water – potable and plentiful.
O
n a clear-water day, the locals say, you can look into
the New Croton Reservoir and see the dam wall of the
old Croton shimmering in the depths. And if you wander about the popular park just below the new dam wall you’ll
find a trail that snakes into the woods for hikers, bikers and
horseback riders to use. This popular path runs atop the old
Croton aqueduct that delivered New York City its first fresh
clean water.
These are some of the living reminders of the fascinating
and turbulent story of how a city that is almost totally surrounded by undrinkable salt water reached out far beyond its municipal boundaries to find permanent sources of fresh water.
New York was in a festive mood in the summer of 1842
when the first water came gushing into the city, according to
written records and illustrations of that time. A widely published lithograph shows paraders strutting down a wide avenue
identified as Broadway. The procession swings around City
Hall Park and onto Park Row. American flags and bunting fly
from buildings and, the caption informs, some quarter million
people turned out in their Sunday best to march in or watch the
grandest parade the city had ever seen. (Not a bad turnout for a
population of 312,000.) The date of the parade, which was held
a few months after the water actually began flowing, was
S ICK
CITY
Until the waters of the Croton Reservoir flowed into the
city for the first time in June of 1842, lack of clean water had
become the growing city’s living nightmare.
Plagues of cholera, malaria, typhoid and yellow fever were
by then frequent summer occurrences in a city whose open
drains and groundwater were contaminated by human and animal wastes. Two major disasters finally forced Tammany politicians - the city’s corrupt and entrenched Democratic Party
machine – into spending the public’s money on the public
instead of themselves. The cholera epidemic of 1832 killed
3,513 people and emptied the city of those who could afford to
find a place to stay in the country.
But it was the fire of 1835 that helped release the purse
strings and speed up the search for water. Though only two people died in the fire, the destruction of millions of dollars worth
11
of commercial buildings galvanized the bankers, brokers and
manufacturers into action.
It wasn’t that Manhattan had lacked natural water when
Europeans first arrived. Fresh water streams and beaver ponds
had been more than enough for the Lenape Indians and wild
animals who had lived on the island for thousands of years. The
Europeans’ first impression was that a great lake surrounded the
islands. When the Florentine navigator, Giovanni da
Verrazzano, dropped anchor in 1524 in the narrows between
Brooklyn and Staten Island, he described the Upper Bay as “a
very beautiful lake.” The man after whom the narrows were
later named (the bridge authority mistakenly dropped one of the
‘z’s in his name) is quoted in “Gotham. A History of New York
City to 1898” as saying his ship was surrounded by small boats
carrying people “clad with feathers of fowls of diverse colors.”
The natives, he said, greeted them “very cheerfully, making
great shouts of admiration.”
I CY
areas. The Lenape regularly moved camp and abandoned their
planted fields, which became meadows full of grass, berries and
flowers. The Lenape believed they were part of nature, and they
believed that the land, if ownership could be attributed at all,
belonged to the whole community.
They had been living in the area for over 6,000 years by
the time the Europeans landed and found a population of about
15,000 native people scattered in camps across the islands.
The Europeans saw the Lenape as slothful and barbarous
for not taking better advantage of the natural abundance of the
land. The land was full of edible and usable wild plants and
trees and plenty of game and fish.
“Oysters grew so large they had to
No Crapper!
be cut in three to eat,” Gerard T.
Contrary to popular
Koeppel writes in “Water for
belief, Sir Thomas
Gotham,” referring to a written
Crapper did not invent
account of the time.
the flush toilet.
The new settlers were also
In 1596 Sir John
contemptuous of the natives’
Harrington, godson of
relaxed attitude towards land ownQueen Elizabeth I,
ership, which the newcomers
invented the first waterexploited mercilessly.
closet-type flush toilet.
Within years of the infamous
His device flushed the
1626 60-guilder ($24) purchase of
bowl through a straight
Manhattan Island, the European
pipe to the cesspool
way of life started taking its toll.
below - a method that
The residents of New Amsterdam,
did not stop the smell
initially established as a trading
from wafting back up
post for the Dutch West India
into the toilet room.
Company, were soon selling and
buying pieces of land on which
It wasn’t until 1775
they built houses and farmed.
that British engineer
Within a generation of
Alexander Cummings
European settlement, human and
invented a valve and
animal waste and water quality
siphon trap, which prehad become a problem. In that
vented the smell from
short time, the settlement had
returning.
grown to 350 buildings in the triChamber pots conangle formed by what is today
tinued to be the stanWall Street and the Hudson and
dard in America until a
East Rivers. Privies flowed onto
century later, when
the streets causing smelly wallows
cities were hooked up to
that were quickly occupied by the
water supplies dependproliferating hog population. Trash
able enough to refill
and human waste were dumped
flush toilet bowls at five
into ditches or the nearest water,
gallons a pop.
running or stagnant.
LAKES AND FIRST HUMANS
In fact, these vast bays and estuaries had lakes long before
the Lenape moved in. After the last glaciers receded some
17,000 years ago, they left a ridge of debris, or moraine, that
dammed the melting water. The resulting lakes covered much of
what is now metropolitan New York for a few thousand years.
Finally the part of the ridge now known as the Narrows gave
way, and the lakes drained into the ocean. As the higher land,
including Manhattan, Staten and Long islands, began to sprout
scrub woodlands and meadows about 12,000 years ago, woolly
mammoths, musk oxen, saber-toothed tigers and giant beavers
migrated in. They were followed by the area’s first human
inhabitants – small itinerant bands of hunters who lived off the
game. As the warming continued, the habitat gradually changed
to hardwood forests, and the large animals moved south, followed by the hunters. The melting ice raised the ocean levels,
which flowed back into the narrows and into all the fjords and
low ground left by the receded glacier. They formed the Hudson
River Estuary, Long Island Sound, and the East and Harlem
rivers, among other bodies of water.
The new habitat on the islands attracted smaller animals
and edible plants. Into this moved the Lenape, who preferred
hunting small game, fishing in the streams and estuaries, and
foraging for berries and herbs. Their life style worked well for
the environment, for they believed that all life was interdependent and they would not kill any more animals than they needed
for survival. The Lenape cleared areas around their camps and
seasonally burnt vast areas of woodland undergrowth. Birds,
deer, rabbits and sun-loving plants thrived in the more open
12
WATERLESS
tation and fresh water again were
ignored. Much of the energy was
spent jockeying for position in the
new political order, with the eyes
mostly on personal, rather than
public, benefit.
The city’s Common Council
heard several proposals to solve
the urgent need for a new and sufficiently abundant source of clean
water. But the city fathers, hampered by lack of public funds,
tried to turn over responsibility to
the private sector. This abdication
of responsibility was to plague the
city for decades. An ambitious and
ingenious plan to dam the Bronx
River got lost in the intrigue.
Instead, Aaron Burr used water
provision as a front for public
funding of his Manhattan
Company, which ultimately
became the successful and profitable financial institution, the
Chase Manhattan Bank.
Burr obtained public funding
to start a company that was given
the sole charter to provide water
to the city. But the charter did not
require him to use the money for
water. Rather than tie the capital
up in such expensive public projects as the Bronx River system,
Mr. Burr and his cronies drilled
only a few token wells and laid
cheap wooden pipes, instead of
the more expensive iron pipes
which were by then available.
And instead of building a
reservoir that would meet the
city’s estimated needs of three
million gallons of water a day, the
Manhattan Company built a
132,600-gallon reservoir with a
fancy façade of Doric columns
and a statue of Oceanus.
It would take the city another
four decades to free itself from the
COUP
The first recorded water quality complaint was made to the
settlement authorities in 1664. A brewer and a carpenter told the
authorities that a new tannery between their properties would
spoil their well water. The settlement fathers refused to do anything about it, establishing a long tradition of official indifference to pollution and the need for clean, potable water.
Ironically, Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant paid dearly for
his failure to carry through on a citizen’s request to sink a well
near the fort at the tip of the island. The well-less fort enabled
the British fleet to take over the island in a “waterless coup” in
late August of 1664.
The British built the first public wells – one in the fort, of
course – in the settlement of New Amsterdam, which they
renamed New York after King Charles II’s brother James
Stewart, the duke of York. That name was also given to the territory called New Netherland, now New York State.
But though public water improved somewhat under British
rule, little was done about sanitation beyond the street sweeping
already instituted by Gov. Stuyvesant, who, after going home to
be reprimanded and punished by the West India Company,
returned to New York to live under the British. Tidal rivers
remained the growing city’s sewers. A
1731 law enforced dumping of “Tubs of
Weepers
Dung, Close Stools or Pots of Ordure or
Nastiness” late at night. These condiThe New
tions left the city easy prey to epidemic
Croton Aqueduct,
diseases that started to take their toll
built between 1885
soon after the British took control. The
and 1890, is still
authorities blamed the deaths on sinfulintact and operating
ness, though historical hindsight points
today. Its capacity
to typhoid, malaria and cholera.
is three times that
Sickness and filth went hand in
of the old aquehand through the 18th century, as
duct. An innovation
Manhattan’s streams, ponds and wells
was the inclusion
succumbed to pollution.
of weep holes or
Nevertheless, the city kept growing.
“weepers.” These
Though growth stagnated during the
are four-by-eightAmerican Revolution, the population
foot openings that
rebounded soon after the war ended.
allow groundwater
When New York became an American
to seep into the
city in 1783, it was in a shambles. Much
aqueduct, adding
of it had been burnt to the ground, and
about four million
its land had been stripped of trees. What
gallons a day to the
sanitation the city had before 1775 had
flow.
broken down completely during the war.
But in the scramble to rebuild, sani-
13
The infamous
duel
In the early hours
of July 11, 1804, in a
field in Weehawken,
New Jersey, just across
the Hudson River from
42nd Street in New York
City, two men faced
each other with pistols
drawn. One of them,
Aaron Burr, who was
the vice president of the
United States, aimed his
gun and fired. The other
man fell mortally
wounded. He was
Alexander Hamilton,
the new Republic’s first
secretary of the treasury
and a leading politician
and author of the
Federalist Papers.
The duel ended a
long-simmering rivalry
between the two men
that included their
involvement in the
Manhattan Company.
What finally made
Burr throw down the
gauntlet, however, was
a newspaper quote by
Hamilton that Burr was
a “dangerous man, and
one who ought not to
be trusted with the reins
of government.”
The deadly duel
ended Hamilton’s life
and Burr’s political
career.
constraints of the Manhattan Company charter and provide an
adequate water supply.
In the meantime, even as boom times came to the city, its
streets, groundwater, ponds and rivers got filthier, the residents
continued to die like flies, and fires continued to devastate both
buildings and people.
Remarkably, this didn’t stop the population from growing
exponentially. In 1800, the city had 60,000 residents. In less
than five years the figure had jumped to 76,000.
was that it ran through the “primitive landscape” of Westchester
County. The proposer believed that the steep banks of the river
would prevent future settlement. Back then some 36,000 people
lived in the 480-square-mile county, mostly in 21 villages.
Farmland and country estates of wealthy New Yorkers took up
most of the land.
R EFERENDUM
The plan excited much interest – for and against – and it
took several years of political and legislative action, most of it
Philadelphia’s waterworks
behind the scenes and a public campaign before a much-altered
Although New York was on its way to becoming America’s
Croton plan was put to the public for approval. The April 14,
largest city, it was well behind most others in providing water.
1835, referendum, which was held during an unseasonably bitPhiladelphia, for one, was making great strides forward by
ter cold snap and a driving snowstorm, was fiercely opposed by
1798 when the English-born architect, Benjamin Latrobe,
Westchester landowners, well-digging companies
designed and built the country’s first public
and, of course, the Manhattan Company. The usuwater system, using water from the
From hero to rascal ally partisan press came together for once to supSchuylkill River. Flawed as the system was,
Aaron Burr, the man who
port the plan.
the nation noticed that the 1805 yellow
almost became the third presiBut New Yorkers desperately wanted water
fever that hit New York, only skirted
dent of the United States,
and voted accordingly – 17,330 for, 5,963 against.
Philadelphia. The system was soon replaced played a major and negative
Ironically, the wards that voted against the plan
by the successful Fairmount Waterworks,
were the ones that needed water the most – the
role in New York City’s water
which pumped water out of the Schuylkill
poorest immigrant neighborhoods that had the
history. Because of his
about a mile upriver. By 1830, after a numworst wells and no money to buy water.
Manhattan Company, which Mr.
ber of improvements, Philadelphia’s public
After typical dithering and closed-door banBurr founded under the guise of
waterworks were supplying over two miltering,
council appointed engineer John
providing water, the city’s
lion gallons a day to 10,000 customers.
Bloomfield Jervis to head the project. Jervis, who
search for clean water was put
Other cities, such as Boston and
had turned down a position as chief engineer of
back about 40 years. A
Baltimore, had sporadic successes with
the expansion of the Erie Canal to take the job,
Revolutionary War hero, U.S.
water systems built and run by private
quickly moved the project out of its stalled status.
Senator, vice president, duelist,
investors.
Fighting politicians, bad weather, rugged terbanker and entrepreneur, Mr.
Finally in the early 1830s the
rain, labor strikes, worker fatalities, landowners
Burr’s star crashed after his infaManhattan Company’s water star began to
and a flood that toppled his first dam wall, Mr.
mous duel with Alexander
fade, even as it was thriving as a private
Jervis built what was then considered a worldHamilton. He was eventually
bank founded on public funds. With the
class engineering marvel. The completed system
tried for treason and died a disrealization that the company was keeping
consisted of a 50-foot-high stone and masonry
graced man. In his heyday, Mr.
the city from finding a solution to its water
dam wall across the Croton and a 40-mile aqueBurr tied with Thomas Jefferson
problems, the increasingly pro-water
duct that included an arched bridge over a stream
in electoral votes in the 1800
Common Council began to look elsewhere.
at what was then Sing Sing, now Ossining. The
With estimates that the city’s popularace for president, but lost the
magnificent Harlem High Bridge, which still
tion would reach a million within 60 years - deciding vote in the House of
stands (unused), carried the water into Manhattan.
in fact it happened in 40 years - a rough
Representatives, when
The 400-acre lake impounded by the dam could
plan to tap the Croton River was presented
Hamilton persuaded his followhold up to 600 million gallons of water. Waste
to Common Council. The idea was to divert ers to support Jefferson. Mr.
weirs were built at various points along the aquethe river into an open channel and run it
Burr then became vice presiduct so that water could be diverted for maintealongside the Hudson by gravity to the city
dent, a position that went to the
nance without draining the whole conduit. (The
40 miles to the south - with no dam, tunnels runner-up in those days.
Harlem Bridge was finished several years after the
or pipes. One perceived plus for the Croton
14
rest of the system was built; temporary pipes were laid on the
river bottom to carry the water to the city while the bridge was
completed.) At the New York end, a 180-million-gallon receiving reservoir, the Yorkville Reservoir, was built between 6th
and 7th Avenues and 79th and 86th streets. The reservoir
became part of Central Park a few years later; later still the
reservoir was filled in and is today Central Park’s Great Lawn.
Iron pipes with three-foot diameters carried the water on to the
Murray Hill distributing reservoir between 40th and 42nd
Streets, and now occupied by the New York Public Library.
At the completion of the dam, Jervis and the New York
water commissioners took a three-day walk down the aqueduct.
When water was first released into the aqueduct in the summer
of 1842, the same men rode down the conduit on a boat called
the Croton Maid. The water flowed into the city reservoirs amid
great fanfare including a 45-cannon salute.
The arrival of the water was a major morale booster for
New Yorkers, who had suffered disease, fires and filth. They
were also suffering from a deep economic depression that had
started the same year as that construction had begun.
Yet New York City households were slow to hook up to the
new water. It took several more killing plagues and fires to
finally convince people of the necessity of clean, wholesome
water.
Finally in the 1850s, after the completion of the Harlem
High Bridge had increased pressure, indoor toilets, bathrooms,
plumbing and sewers became fixtures of city life. Plumbing
installations started to boom, as did the general economy. As
running water became an expected fixture of households, it was
soon evident the Croton would not meet demands much longer.
By the 1880s Manhattan’s population had topped the million
mark and ever-thirsty New Yorkers were using 100 gallons of
water a day, the highest per capita water consumption in the
world.
The aqueduct had by then reached capacity, a situation that
Fools of Gotham
With all the foolishness that was
going on in the city in the early nineteenth century, it was no wonder that
New York earned the nickname
Gotham. The name stuck after
Washington Irving’s series of parodies,
the popular and satirical “Salmagundi
was further exacerbated by the fact that it was leaking. A large
new aqueduct was built and a new 240-foot-high dam was constructed on the Croton River below the old structure. When it
was completed in 1905, it became the tallest dam in the world.
Eleven more reservoirs were built in the upper Croton watershed, and three lakes in Putnam County were added to the system.
By the late 19th century it was obvious that New York City
had exhausted available supplies in West Chester and Putnam
counties. The question was where to go next?
One alternative was to contract with a private company to
supply water. Inspired by an 1896 “Scientific American” supplement on the Catskill Mountains’ watershed, the Ramapo
Water Company bought water rights to thousands of square
miles in the Catskills and offered to supply the city 200 million
gallons of water a day at $70 per million gallons, writes Diane
Galusha in “Liquid Assets.” But a public outcry against the proposal forced the city to abandon its consideration of the offer.
New York City – by then a three-million-strong amalgamation of Manhattan (on its own the largest city in America),
Brooklyn (the fourth largest), Queens, the Bronx and Staten
Island – launched an independent investigation into future
water sources. The resulting 980-page report gave a range of
alternatives, from developing the wells of Long Island to pumping and filtering water from the Hudson to damming creeks in
Duchess and Columbia counties east of the Hudson, and in
Ulster, Schoharie, Albany and Greene counties west of the
Hudson.
An appalled Dutchess County reacted immediately by legislating against any incursion from New York City.
So the city decided to make the big jump across the
Hudson to tap the pristine Catskill Mountains watersheds. A
board of water supply was created, and the massive project
began with the appointment of J. Waldo Smith as chief engineer.
Papers,” frequently referred to the city as
acted like fools when the king’s scouts
Gotham. The name originated in thir-
arrived. The king skipped the town, but
teenth-century England when King John
the legend lived on in traveling theater
and his army were about to descend on
that eventually came to America. As
the town of Gotham, which means
Gerard T. Koeppel writes in his “Water
Goat’s Town in old Anglo-Saxon.
for Gotham,” “In no way had Gotham
Knowing the king’s reputation for mak-
been more foolish than in failing to pro-
ing the locals pay dearly for these
cure good water.”
through trips, the men of Gotham all
15
4
A Long First Summer
“As it enters the
twenty-first century, New
York City has the world’s
oldest continuously running urban water supply.
The city no longer seeks
new sources of water but
preserves and conserves
its existing supplies,
especially in the suburbanized Croton Valley.
The Croton remains a
bridge between the city’s
past and future: its first
successful water quest
that made the modern
city possible.”
The spillway of the
New Croton
Closing paragraph
of “Water for Gotham.”
Reservoir.
Through all this the
Muscoot River flows
into a series of reservoirs: first the Amawalk, which feeds the
Muscoot Reservoir, which in turn dams the Croton River and
overflows into the New Croton Reservoir. The Muscoot River,
whose relatively small size belies its importance, is one of the
Stroud Center’s ten integrative sampling stations. The stream
rises in the Mahopac area of Putnam County and meanders
down a wooded valley into Westchester County. Several busy
highways bridge the stream, and development is encroaches.
The wooded areas are deceiving. In summer their density
gives the impression of vast acres of pristine woods. But as any
of the many side roads quickly reveals, the greenery hides a
W
hen the Stroud
Center field crews
arrived in the spring of 2000 to begin their sampling, they found a Croton River watershed that was starkly different from the “primitive landscape” of 1842 when the first
dam was built.
Much of the area around the reservoirs is heavily developed suburbia marked by a network of busy high-speed parkways and bypasses, some of which cross the Croton Reservoir
on steel bridges. Bustling towns and shopping centers are ubiquitous. And signs of new construction are everywhere, sprawling northwards from the more densely populated southern suburbs.
17
glut of culs-de-sac. Also on closer examination, it is obvious
that the trees – particularly along the streams – are quite young.
They’re mostly the maples and locusts so typical of new-growth
woods. There is no evidence of the old-growth forests that once
covered the area. One reason for this is that in 1903 the city
health department’s chief identified decomposing leaves in the
streams and reservoirs as the source of a typhoid outbreak.
Despite opposition from engineers and botanists, the city clearcut the woods along the streams and reservoirs – the riparian
buffers that we now know are so important to the health of the
waterways. Although the typhoid source was never “officially”
discovered, the most likely culprit was sewage, most of which
then discharged directly into the nearest body of flowing water.
B UG
CREWS MOVE IN
It is easy to find a motel at one of the many busy intersections in the sprawling suburbia of Westchester and Putnam
counties, where the Stroud crews based themselves while working in the Croton area. The rooms are cheap but comfortable –
just a place to spend the night – and give the field crews access
to a parking lot on which to sort their gear and load the vans. In
the mornings passersby would see the Stroud vans and a boat
parked outside. The crews were a curious sight as they prepared
their tons of odd-looking instruments and paraphernalia for the
day’s sampling.
The first field workers to arrive in the Croton watershed
after Sweeney’s reconnaissance trips were scientist John
Jackson’s entomologists - known to their colleagues as the “bug
crews.” They need to get their sampling done early in the season before the insects start emerging as adults.
C RAZY
SEASON
Timing is critical to the aquatic insect sampling. Stroud
entomologist John Jackson said the challenge is to get his crews
in just after the snow melt and spring storm flows begin to
recede.
Spring “is a crazy time,” said Jackson, who was running
crews in the Savannah and Flint Rivers watersheds as well as
the new project in New York.
Warblers were just beginning to move through the area
when the first bug crews arrived on Sunday, April 30, so they
could get an early start Monday. They had to sample all 60
sites. On a good day a three-person team can do two sites a day.
Their days are long. The crews usually leave their rooms by
7 a.m. and don’t get back until 6 p.m. At that time of year, the
water flowing down from the higher areas is icy. It doesn’t take
long for the chill to work its way through neoprene waders and
heavy trapper’s gloves.
Jackson had two teams in New York at first, and then three
so that he could finish in time. They were done in 20 days. A
sampling site is as much as 100 meters of stream, depending on
habitat. The crews use a device called a Surber sampler that
encloses about a square-foot of streambed. They scrub bugs off
the rocks in the enclosure, measure and record the depth and
velocity of the water, and collect rocks covered with algae to
evaluate the amount of food available for the aquatic life of the
stream.
The Muscoot River, a feeder stream for the Croton Reservoir.
18
Using what Jackson calls the “composite
technique,” the field staff combine the 16 samples from each site into four sets which are
taken back to the lab as a representative sampling of the site. The bugs are washed down in
the lab, “subsampled” into a more manageable
number and separated into genera and species
where possible.
“If you look at 200 insects you might find
30 to 35 different species,” said Jackson.
The data gathered helps to determine the
health of the ecosystems by determining the
abundance and diversity of the aquatic insects.
“We were very lucky. The weather cooperated with our spring sampling,” said Jackson.
Technician Sally Peirson concurred: “We
got out just in time.” On the day they finished,
they drove home in torrential rain.
C HOMPING
Dave Montgomery sampling during a spiraling experiment in the Muscoot River.
Finally, in late June, the QA officer, as he is called, gave
the signal, and the Stroud vans began the four-and-a-half-hour
weekly trips to New York that would last well into fall.
A reconnaissance crew went up first to work out a schedule. Blast off for the bulk of summer sampling was set for the
week of July 10. As it turned out, the sampling would continue
into October.
TO GET GOING
While the bug crews had finished their field work by the
end of May, the other crews were still waiting for the green
light from E.P.A.’s quality assurance officer. Charles Dow, a
young research scientist with a doctorate in forest hydrology
from Penn State University, had recently been hired as the project coordinator. With the sampling season well under way, he
was anxious to get going. So were the various section heads and
their crews: Denis Newbold’s spiraling team, Tom Bott’s microbiology team, Laurel Standley’s organic chemistry team, and
Lou Kaplan’s biogoechemistry team - and all the new people
who had been hired especially for the New York project.
S PIRALING
The plan was to do “spiraling” – a complicated procedure
for measuring how a stream uses up nutrients over a measured
distance – at the 10 integrative sites. As spiraling is the most
Malls and big box stores such as this one are common in the Croton watershed.
19
time-consuming and labor-intensive of the sampling methods
used, the goal was to do one injection a week of the nutrients
and dye used in the experiment.
In a layperson’s nutshell, the Stroud Center monitoring program looks at a stream and its watershed as a complex, interdependent ecosystem. Healthy streams and their watersheds are
sophisticated recycling systems made up of extraordinarily
diverse plant and animal life. As natural or man-created chemicals and pathogens flow down a stream, the plants and animals
consume and convert them into other forms of energy. Water
scientists have found that the main chemicals, such as nitrogen,
phosphorous and carbon, are used up again and again as they
spiral downstream. Hence the term “spiraling,” which measures
the stream’s ability to consume these nutrients.
Using a technique the Stroud Center developed, nutrients
and a dye are injected into a stream. As the nutrients flow
downstream, samples are taken at measured intervals and analyzed to establish how much stream it took to use them up. This
is called the spiraling length. The shorter the length, the healthier the stream.
A variety of other sampling types and procedures are also
used, often in combination with each other. The Stroud monitoring program comprises nine such “tasks,” which together
provide an overall picture of the watersheds – the quality of
their water and the factors that affect it. Some are done at all
sites while others are conducted only at selected sites. These
monitoring tasks are, as summarized from the Center’s Year 1
Final Report:
pounds that can be linked to their sources. For instance, caffeine and the fragrances of domestic detergents point to waste
water treatment plants.
■ Nutrients and major ions in transport: This task samples for
the ions of certain chemicals, including sodium, magnesium,
calcium, potassium, sulfates and chlorides, as well as the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorous. High concentrations of these
ions and nutrients can indicate a malfunctioning ecosystem.
■ Molecular genetic pathogen analysis: This task tracks fecal
pollution through the presence of fecal coliform (Escherichia
coli) or E. coli as the bacteria are commonly called. The source
of fecal contamination can be traced through its genetic makeup. The Stroud Center uses a technique called ribotyping that
can tell whether the source of the pollutant is human or other
animal types.
■ Macroinvertebrate community structure and function: The
abundance and kinds of benthic (bottom-dwelling) macroinvertebrates such as insects, worms and molluscs, give a picture
over time of water quality conditions in the watersheds.
■ Organic particle dynamics: Suspended solids in the water
show a stream’s effectiveness in using up organic matter and
give an estimate of carbon loading in downstream reservoirs.
■ Dissolved and biodegradable organic carbon dynamics:
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) can indicate the extent of
organic loadings and determine how well the riparian soils,
forests and wetlands are using up
organic matter.
■ Molecular tracer analysis: Tracers are a broad group of com-
■ Nitrogen, phosphorous and DOC
spiraling: Nitrogen, phosphorous and
carbohydrates are injected into the
stream, and the spiraling length is
measured.
Lara Martin calibrates the equipment for a spiraling experiment in the Muscoot River.
20
■ Stream metabolism: Measurements
of photosynthesis and respiration indicate the rates of algal growth and the
degradation of organic matter by
organisms in the stream. Changes in
these measurements can signal that
land-use activities are affecting the
water and suggest follow-up work on
upstream tributaries.
From left, Chad Colburn, Bob Smith and Charles Dow haul the boat in after sampling in the New Croton Reservoir.
September.
That was the plan. But things happen – like storms, of
which there were more than the usual number in the summer of
2000. It turned out to be a long summer. The Stroud crews didn’t get out of the field until late October, by which time the
trees were already bare and the mountain air chilly.
Murphy’s Law is a fact of life in the field – if something
can go wrong, it will; and it did. It was a particularly useful lesson for the young interns and the field workers fresh out of college.
■ Reservoir primary productivity: Measurements of algae in
the reservoirs are compared to those in the feeder streams. If
growth in a reservoir varies noticeably over time from algal
growth in its main feeder stream, the inference would be that
significant amounts of nutrients are coming from sources other
than the stream.
Even with the late start, if everything had gone according
to schedule, the field work would have been done by mid-
A CROSS
THE
H UDSON
Extensive as the Croton system
may seem with its 12 reservoirs and
three controlled lakes in a 375-squaremile watershed, it only provides 10 percent of New York City’s water, or about
250 million out of the 1.3 billion gallons the city consumes each day. It took
a paradigm shift in thinking - in size,
technology, distance and scope - for
city officials to jump the Hudson and
seek new sources. Actually, they didn’t
jump, they burrowed under the
riverbed.
The New Croton dam wall, in its time the biggest in the world.
21
5
Into the Catskill Mountains
“Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Catskill Mountains. They
are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the
river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of
season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the
magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far
and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue
and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes, when the rest of
the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in
the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.”
From “Rip Van Winkle. A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker.”
By Washington Irving
A wintry sunset over the Ashokan Reservoir.
23
W
ell out of cell-phone range in the middle of the
Catskill Mountains Park, a narrow road winds up
Big Indian Hollow along the upper Esopus Creek.
Just past the hamlet of Oliverea in a grove of scattered conifers
is a row of rental lodges called Slide Mountain Forest House.
The first lodge, vaguely resembling a Swiss chalet, is where the
Stroud fieldworkers spent most of their nights during the summer of 2000.
From this central base the crews could fan out to the
Schoharie to the north, the Delaware River branches and reserSome of the Stroud Center’s field crew at their base “chalet” in
voirs to the west, the Ashokan Reservoir to the east and the
the Catskills. From left, Chad Colburn, Lara Martin, Jessica
Rondout and Neversink to the south.
Mathisen, Kevin Smith and project coordinator Charles Dow.
Slide Mountain, whose name the lodge owners took, rises
4,190 feet above sea level, the tallest peak of the Catskill
Mountains. It overlooks the vastness of the Catskills, from the
M YSTICAL ( NON ) MOUNTAINS
Hudson River to the east to the distant western foothills where
As Washington Irving wrote in his story of Rip Van
the Delaware River rises.
Winkle, the Catskills do have a mystical quality.
In the east the Catskill Mountains climb suddenly from the
In the summer the mountains are covered in a dense mat of
Hudson River plain in a steep ridge the Indians called the Wall
trees, which softens their appearance. Without the stark craggiof Manitou. But where the Catskills actually begin and end is a
ness that gives added emphasis to the heights of so many other
matter of some conjecture.
mountain ranges, the Catskills look smaller than their 3,000- to
The New York State legislature defines the Catskills as an
4,000-foot height. Under the summer covering are rocks that are
extensive region of 6,260 square miles – an area larger than
hundreds of millions of years old.
Connecticut. This definition includes six entire
There is some question about whether the
counties plus parts of several others. It stretches
West-of-Hudson Catskills are true mountains in the geological sense
along the Hudson from just south of Albany to
because they were a plateau formed by erosion,
New York City’s
the outskirts of New York City. To the west it
rather than being folded and faulted into shape. All
west-of-Hudson “watergoes almost to Binghampton.
this fascinates amateur and professional geologists
The not-for-profit Catskill Watershed
shed” actually comprises
who come to the area from far and wide to see the
Corporation administers projects funded under
parts of two major river
rock formations and the ancient fossil trees of
the Memorandum of Agreement for the waterwatersheds, the Hudson
Gilboa, which were found when the Schoharie
sheds west of the Hudson, including the
and the Delaware. The
Reservoir was excavated. Armchair geologists don’t
Delaware. Its area covers about one million
watershed includes much
even have to visit to study the Catskills; they can
acres across five counties, encompasses 50 rural
of the land of five countour the mountains virtually, compliments of the
towns and includes the 66,000 people who live
ties - Ulster, Green,
College of Oneonta, N.Y. Just a click on Stop 1 at
in the watershed.
Schoharie, Sullivan and
www.hartwick.edu/geology/work/VFT-soThe state’s Department of Environmental
Delaware. The 1,581far/VFT.html, will launch them on a wonderful trip.
Conservation, however, confines its definition of
square-mile watershed is
It they do, they will learn that during the
the Catskills to the Catskill Park, an area of
larger than the State of
Ordovician Period of 505 million to 450 million
about 700,000 acres.
Delaware.
years ago, a shallow sea covered most of New York
The City of New York’s definition of the
State. To the east were the Taconics, a high mounCatskills is narrower still. The Catskills System
tain range that ran along roughly what is now New
includes the northeastern half of the park and
York’s border with Connecticut and Massachusetts. Erosion of
extends northwards out of the park into Green, Schoharie and
mud and red sand from the mountains gradually filled the sea,
Delaware counties. Two reservoirs, the Ashokan and Schoharie,
pushing its shore westwards until New York State became dry
and their feeder streams and catchment areas, make up the
land about 430 million years ago. About 375 million years ago
Catskills System, which provides 40 percent of the city’s water.
the Acadian Mountains were formed by a collision of the
24
Schoharie
European and North American land masses. These mountains
wonderful piles of rocks and soil that developed into the
stretched from Greenland to south of New York State and were
Catskills of today. The rocks are relatively free from inorganic
thought to have been about 20,000 feet high. Eventually the
elements that can have adverse effects on water quality. That’s
Acadians eroded and their sediment washed into the shallow
why New York City enjoys “soft” water which lathers easily
inland sea that covered much of North America at the time.
because it does not contain enough calcium and magnesium to
That rocky sediment accumulated to form a relatively flat seamake the water “hard.” The rocks also have a low content of
level plateau that was eroded by a river into what is known to
iron and manganese, which means the water doesn’t leave rusty
geologists today as the Catskill Delta.
and black stains. And the relative absence of sulfides is the reaThe erosion of the Acadians left the heaviest and coarsest
son why water smells and tastes so pure.
sediment close to its base, which is why the eastern Catskills
According to Jill S. Schneiderman in “The Earth Around
are made up of more erosion-resistant rocks, while the softer
Us Maintaining a Livable Planet,” the reason the region’s rocks
shales were carried and deposited farther west. That’s also why
are relatively pure is that they are the result of erosion. Most of
the Catskill Mountains are higher in the east. The only remnants
the eroded sediments that make up the Catskills are quartz,
of the Acadians today are the Berkshires in western
which survived because it is so hard and unreactive, and
Massachusetts.
feldspar, which was so plentiful. Because quartz is made up of
The last orogeny – or mountain genesis – happened 280
silicon and oxygen, and feldspar consists of sodium, potassium,
million to 250 million years ago when the North American and
aluminum, silicon and oxygen, Ms. Schneiderman writes, “they
European land masses collided once more. The land buckled,
contain almost nothing that will change the chemistry of water.”
pushing up the Appalachian Mountains that ranged from
One downside of the Catskills’ geological history is that it
Newfoundland to Georgia. But instead of being buckled and
left much of the region with shallow soils and bedrock close to
distorted like much of the rest of the region, the Catskill Delta
the surface. As a result, according to a 1999 study, the soils are
was simply lifted, remaining pretty much as it had been –
generally not conducive to sub-surface disposal of wastewater,
except now at a higher level. This is why some geologists clasand many of the septic systems throughout the watershed are
sify the Catskills as a dissected plateau, rather than as a mounfailing or in need of repair. This is one of the problems the city
tain range.
faces in its battle to keep the water clean and healthy without
And this is how the Catskills remained for the next 250
filtering.
million years, as the dinosaurs
N
came and went and modern animals evolved. More subtle
ed
changes happened during the
sh
er
t
a
four ice ages, which began 1.6
W
Cats
kills Park Bo
e
undary
million years ago and ended
r
D
●
a
C atsk
w
i
l
l
14,000 years ago with the
● CATSKILL
la
S
e
A
D
Wisconsin glaciation, which
● ●
sculpted the Catskills’ rocky ter28
Big
●P
Indian
rain more or less into what the
vil
le
ns
mountains look like today.
✖
Pepacton
Sli
Canno
de Lodge
W
Mo
e ●B
One obvious glacier carving
un
tai
n
28
can be seen from the New York
Ca
ts k
an
ills
Thruway between Kingston and
o
● KINGSTON
Pa
rk
As h
Bo u
n
d
ary
the town of Catskill. The 10nk
rsi
mile-long Wall of Manitou is a
nd
ut
sudden and steep mountain ridge
that marks the eastern edge
West of the
of the Catskills.
For the most part, geoHudson
logical history has been good
to the watersheds, leaving the
r
Esopus C
OODSTOCK
NY State Thruway
o
25
Ro
Neve
k
ek
OICEVILLE
on
W
al
rshed
HOENICIA
Huds
ate
lo
f Manito u
W
ken Tunnel
HA
ND LL
AK AB
EN EN
Ri
ver
nda
Sha
ELHI
R APE
OF THE
C ATSKILLS
A cat by any name
Three hundreds years of European settlement in the
Catskills is but a miniscule blip in the geological calendar. Yet
in that short time the settlers managed to ravage the natural
landscape as never before. For about 10,000 years before the
European invasion, the nomadic Native Americans roamed,
hunted, gathered food and grew their summer crops in the
region. Their free-ranging lifestyle was at the mercy of the
weather and their gods. Land ownership was beyond their
understanding.
When Henry Hudson sailed past the area now known as the
Catskills, he and his crew on the “Half Moon” found a settlement of “very loving people and old men,” according to ship
mate Robert Juet, writes Alf Evers in his “The Catskills. From
Wilderness of Woodstock.” Evers speculates that the young
natives were away in the mountains hunting game and gathering nuts for the winter.
“These Indians did not suspect that their way of life was
nearing its end, that they would soon become an uprooted and
bewildered people, and that their great-grandchildren would
turn over the mountains to something that was neither a god nor
a beast nor an Indian . . . ,” Evers writes.
Beaver trappers and fur traders were exploiting the Indians
and the Catskills, even before the “Half Moon” sailed up the
Hudson. Several decades later, starting in about the 1640s,
whites began to settle around the Catskill and Esopus creeks.
Gradually at first, the Indians were pushed out – with the help
of rum and plenty of deception. Wheeling, dealing and chicanery followed, as the English landed gentry and the colonists
made a grab for the vacated land. One land grant in particular
was to make a lasting impact on the Catskills. It was called the
How Catskills got its name remains clouded
in the area’s poorly recorded early history. Most
place names in the Catskills are colorful bastardizations of Native American, Dutch and
English. The best guess is that Catskills name
comes from “kat,” the Dutch word for a female
cat. “Kill” the name the Dutch settlers used for
streams, is attached to many creeks in New York
and surrounding states. (In the Dutch motherland,
where most land is either at or below sea level,
however, “kill” refers to an ocean inlet.) One of
the streams that flows from the mountains into the
Hudson is called Kaaterskill Creek, though creek
seems redundant when combined with kill. The
town on the Hudson at the mouth of the
Kaaterskill is named Catskill. How’s that for a
confusing jumble?
A nineteenth century attempt to inject some
logic and linguistic correctness into the name by
calling the mountains Kaatsberg – Dutch for “cat
mountain” – fell by the mountainside. Whatever
its linguistic and historic failings, the present
name stuck in a region of many colorful and confusing names.
Part of the 10-mile-long “Wall of Manitou” that marks the eastern edge of the Catskill Mountains.
26
Hardenbergh Patent, which at the stroke of Queen Anne’s quill
Yorkers, were uprooted and sold by the thousands.
gave a million and a half acres to one man. His name was
When the conifers were gone, the woodcutters turned to
Johannis Hardenbergh. As a result, the Catskills became owned
hardwood for furniture, gun stocks, bowls, coffins, paddles,
mostly by absentee landlords and farmed by tenants who eked
boxes and barrels.
out a living along the stream flatlands.
Then Christmas trees became popular. Unlike today, they
Over the next century and a half, the Hardenbergh
came from the wilds, and the Catskills answered the
heirs divided and subdivided the land into a polyglot
demand.
Clove
of small plots and large estates, tenant shanties and a
And so it went until little was left of the forests.
The narrow
scattering of manor houses.
Although it was too late to save the old-growth
ravines and
The Catskills’ biggest battering came in the 19th
forests, two major undertakings at the end of the 19th
chasms between
century. First were the “tanlords,” then the woodcutand beginning of the 20th centuries were to have a
the mountains
ters. Before they arrived, the Catskill Mountains were
major impact on future preservation.
are called
covered in vast forests of hemlock, pine, spruce and
They were the creation of the Catskill Forest
fir. On the lower slopes, hardwoods, such as maple,
Preserve and the building of the Ashokan Reservoir.
“cloves” in
ash and beech, were abundant.
Ironically both were bitterly opposed by most
upstate New
Flowing through these forests were clean, fastCatskills residents.
York. Most dicrunning streams that made ideal sites for tanning facto- tionaries don’t
The shift in thinking towards conservation in
ries and mills. The tanning industry spread quickly
America
began in the second half of the 19th century.
list this definithrough the mountains along the streams. At first the
One of the first warnings of the damage to the land
tion of a word
factories were located as close as possible to the
came from George Perkins Marsh in his book “Man
that is usually
Hudson for easy access to the river ports through
and Nature,” published in 1864. He argued that if the
associated with
which the South American cattle hides were imported.
looting of the soil and water of the United States cona spice. Like
Hemlock bark was ideal for tanning. It was peeled off
tinued, the nation would become incapable of supportmany of the
the tree trunks by specialist barkpeelers, while the rest
ing human life. Marsh’s book started to change the
Catskills’ colorof the tree was left to rot. As they used up what
thinking of many in public service and in the business
ful terms, clove
seemed to be inexhaustible supplies of hemlock, the
community, and pressure began to build to preserve
probably comes
tanners moved farther west into the mountains.
forests and other natural resources. Newspapers and
from a Dutch
Though occasionally slowed by economic recession,
other journals began to promote the preservation of
word, in this
the industry continued until all accessible supplies of
wild areas, including the Adirondack Mountains.
case “kloof,”
hemlock were gone.
But less honorable human instincts proved the
which means
Demand for the straight, tall pines was also enormost important impetus for change. New York busichasm or ravine.
mous. The pine logs, cut mostly in the western
nessmen began to worry about the future of their harCatskills, were lashed together into massive rafts and
bor if it became filled with silt from mountains denudfloated down the Delaware to Philadelphia. Young balsam firs,
ed of trees. Without a harbor their prosperity would be jeopardpopular for ornamenting the gardens of prosperous New
ized. They joined forces with other groups that owed their liv-
Henry Hudson
along the coast of what is now Maine to
lower waters around Albany, Hudson real-
cut a new main mast, the “Half Moon”
ized he had failed. He turned back. The
up the river that now bears his name in
sailed down the coast to Chesapeake and
River of Mountains is what Hudson
September 1609. He was searching for a
Delaware bays. Finding no northwestern
named the river. But the Native Americans
shorter, northwesterly passage to the spice
passage there, they turned north again and
with whom Hudson and his crew made
islands for the Dutch East India Company.
sailed into the Hudson. On September 14,
contact called the river “Muhheakunnuk,”
His ship, the 80-ton “Half Moon,” carried
Henry Hudson thought he had found the
which means great waters constantly in
a crew of 20. The ship sailed out of
illusive northwest passage when the river
motion,” according to the May 1996 issue
Amsterdam in April, and after stopping
widened at what is now Tappan Zee. But
of the Half Moon Press.
Englishman Henry Hudson first sailed
when the “Half Moon” reached the shal-
27
ing to the Erie Canal and the Hudson River – and with hunters
and anglers – to lobby the legislature. Strong opposition, however, was mounted by the lumber industry as well as by the residents of the areas earmarked for preservation. Thus started the
historic rivalry between the city and the mountain residents who
resented the influence the former wielded over their lives and
livelihoods.
The state legislature appointed a committee headed by the
nation’s top tree expert, Harvard’s Professor Charles Sprague
Sargent, to determine if the Catskills should be included in the
forest preserve. After a visit, the committee found that the
mountains had been so “thoroughly ransacked by lumbermen
and barkpeelers that the merchantable timber was gone,” writes
Evers in “From Wilderness to Woodstock.” The committee
decided the Catskills were not worth preserving.
Yet as Evers notes, when the Forest Preserve bill became
law, the Catskills were included as part of a deal that involved
forgiving Ulster County – where much of the present-day preserve is located – its huge tax indebtedness to the state. But no
sooner had the legislators passed the bill, then they made another law under pressure from the upstate lumber industry, land
speculators and railroads. This law created a Forest
Commission – made up of cronies of the lumber industry –
which would oversee the cutting of commercially valuable timber in the forests.
Outraged by the obvious corruption of the new law, the
coalition of city businesses, hunters and fishers, and naturalists
that had promoted the original preservation law organized a
state constitutional convention. Here they bypassed the corrupt
legislature and made preservation of the forests a constitutional
requirement that could only be changed through a public referendum. And so portions of the Catskills came to be preserved
for posterity.
The Catskill Park, however, is not immune to development
because much of the land within its boundaries remains privately owned.
Even as the Stroud field crews were monitoring the streams
and reservoirs in the summer of 2000, battle lines were forming
Beavers, hunted into extinction by fur hunters, are back as this dam on the Schoharie Creek shows.
28
between supporters and opponents of a plan to build a sprawling resort development in the park. The controversy over the
$300-million plan for two 18-hole golf courses, two hotels, theaters, houses and other amenities is described in more detail in
the final sections of this chronicle. Opponents of the plan fear
that the area will be overrun by visitors, threatening the quiet
mountain lifestyle that had brought them to the Catskills.
Proponents argue that the development will bring jobs to an
area where per-capita income is among the lowest in the state.
How conflicts such as this one are resolved will most likely
decide the fate of both the Catskills and New York City’s water
system. Though geographically 90 miles apart, their futures are
inseparably entwined.
Higher than Niagra
Arising in the northeastern corner of the Catskills, a
stream plunges over two successive drops to form the relatively unknown Kaaterskill Falls. Yet, at 260 feet Kaaterskill is
billed as the highest falls in New York – higher than Niagara
which is 185 feet on the New York side, 175 feet on the
Canadian stretch. Kaaterskill is perhaps less appreciated
because, due to the trees and topography, a visitor can only
see one of the plunges at a time.
The Kaaterskill Falls in winter.
29
6
Spiraling the Esopus
I
t’s Thursday, August 2, and the Stroud Center’s Spiraling
Group is preparing to do a stream injection in the Esopus
Creek. Storm clouds are moving over the Catskill
Mountains. Local radio stations are breaking into their regular
programming to warn of storms and potential flooding.
As the crow flies, the Esopus rises a mere eight miles from
the Ashokan Reservoir it feeds. But the valleys the Esopus follows take the stream on a 30-mile circuitous route around
Panther Mountain before it finally empties into the Ashokan.
Geologists suggest that the mountain’s distinctive circumference was caused by a meteor which crashed here about 400
million years ago in the Devonian period. Sedimentary deposits
filled the crater, eventually forming Panther Mountain.
For the first 15 miles the creek grows gradually as it picks
up water from innumerable mountain brooks. But suddenly,
about a mile after it passes Allaben, the Esopus swells into a
torrent where kayakers like to test their skills. For this is where
the Schoharie Reservoir’s contribution to the city’s water supply gushes out of the Shandaken Tunnel into the Esopus.
(Photos and more detail in Chapter 9, pages 3 and 4.) From
here the Esopus curves to the southeast and past Phoenicia,
before bending southwards and winding past Mount Pleasant
and Boiceville where it enters the western arm of the Ashokan,
12 miles from the portal.
W EATHER
PERMITTING
The site the Stroud Center chose for its spiraling injection
on the Esopus Creek runs along a popular trout fishing area
starting from just west of the hamlet of Big Indian to near
Allaben. Between the two hamlets is the village of Shandaken,
where four members of a Stroud crew sit on coolers at a road
31
Chad Colburn samples at station 1 about 100 yards below the spiraling
injection site on the Esopus Creek. A variety of samples are taken at timed
intervals as injected tracers flow downstream.
pull-off, labeling scores of samare set up and rubber hoses are
pling bottles. They are hurrying
attached and anchored in the stream by
because the brewing storm could
some strategically placed rocks to keep
knock out the injection, and their
them from washing away. Also in the
last two days of work would be
water are instruments that keep track of
wasted. The other part of the crew
the varying light intensity, as the sun
is about half a mile up the road.
moves in and out of the passing storm
Two stalwart field technicians,
clouds. Another instrument measures
Bob Smith and Dave
dissolved oxygen.
Montgomery, lug a 45-liter plastic
With all the delicate equipment
carboy filled with purple liquid
hooked up and at the mercy of stream
down a steep bank to the stream.
currents, a lot could go wrong.
They are halfway down the bank
At 3:05 p.m., vans carrying other
when a police car pulls up, and a
crew members begin to arrive from the
man in uniform jumps out. He is a
downstream stations. Five minutes the
D.E.P. officer, and he demands to
last car pulls up. Project coordinator
know “what those gentlemen are
Charles Dow hops out, shaking his
carrying down to the stream.”
head. “Technical difficulties,” he says.
Stroud staffer Lara Martin tries to
He, too, is anxiously watching the
tell him, but he wants proof – a
storm.
permit, something.
Chad Colburn grabs a dry bagel
To someone whose job it is to
and munches on it.
protect New York City’s water
“It’s going to be a late one,” he
supply, what’s happening looks
says.
mighty suspicious. That purple
The six crew members gather to
liquid in a huge container is obvireceive last-minute instructions and to
ously not grape juice meant for a
Lara Martin explains to the D.E.P. police officer why they synchronize watches. Timing is critical
picnic – and it’s obviously heading are carrying a huge carboy full of purple liquid down to to this study.
towards the feeder stream for the
Martin stands in midstream next to
a stream that supplies New York City’s drinking water.
Ashokan Reservoir. Martin shows
the table and starts a count down.
the officer a letter explaining what
Colburn runs off. He is manning
the crew is doing. He relaxes a bit and shakes his head. Though
Station 1, about 100 meters downstream. He has two minutes to
D.E.P. is officially aware that Stroud crews are authorized to
get there.
work in the Catskills watershed, it seems no one has told the
Lara Martin finishes the count down and releases the chemagency’s police. The officer drives off.
icals. A plume of red billows into the stream from under the
Another storm cloud blackens the sky, and Martin, who
table. It trails downstream, moving surprisingly slowly as it
leads the spiraling crew, checks her watch. Time is running out
widens and its color is diluted to a rusty pink. At Station 1
and the weather’s not helping. It’s hot and humid - too hot to
Colburn is looking at his watch while keeping an eye out for the
wear waders. Shorts and T-shirts are the uniform of choice this
dye trail to reach him. He dips a bottle into the water, takes a
day. Ms. Martin and her crewmates finish hauling the equipsample and wades to the bank, which is lined with similar lookment down to the stream, where they are preparing a site for a
ing bottles. He records the time on the label and gets ready to
complicated spiraling study. They set up a portable picnic table
take another sample.
in midstream, prop the 45-liter carboy on a flat rock next to the
Other crew members have driven down to their stations,
table, and hook it up to a pump. Martin spends time calibrating
which are spread out at increasing intervals. The last one is
the pump to make sure it releases the correct amount of the purStation 5, 5.3 miles from the injection site.
ple mixture into the water. An extension cord hooks the pump
The travel speed of the injected nutrients, such as glucose,
to a portable generator at the edge of the stream. Propane tanks
phosphates and ammonium, varies according to the flow level
32
and gradient of a stream. At this
der and lightning began
site the ingredients take about
and the torrents came.
three hours and five minutes to
Everyone rushed to
flow from the injection point to
help take the equipment
Station 5. Samples are taken at
out of the stream and
closely timed intervals at each
back to the vans. After a
station throughout the exercise.
quick consultation, the
The samples are later analyzed
crew decided to scrap the
in the lab, and the data from all
experiment. Down the
five stations are entered into a
stream went the samples
database.
and all the data. The
From the analysis the scienresearchers would have to
tists determine how well the
return and start all over
stream processes the nutrients.
again.
In other words, they are gauging
But time and the seaFrom left, Chad Colburn, Charles Dow and intern Krista Saladino label son were running out.
the health of the ecosystem
hundreds of sampling containers for a spiraling experiment.
itself.
But accurate assessment can
The following week
only come from sound data, which on this August day was literthey were rained out in similar circumstances on the West
ally under a cloud.
Branch of the Delaware River. And again the week after that on
As the plume flowed downstream to Station 5, the storm
the Neversink River. It wasn’t until October 19 that they manclouds thickened. The Stroud crews continued to collect samaged to get a clear and successful spiraling run in the Esopus.
ples, keeping a wary eye on the sky. At times the sun would
By then, the water was beginning to turn icy cold, a clear signal
peer through, then came more clouds and an occasional spot of
that they had only about a week or two to finish for the year.
rain. Then, just as injection was nearing completion, the thun-
The Stroud Center spiraling crew sets up an injection site on the Esopus Creek.
33
Digging for Dutch Schultz’s loot
Rumors and legends abound in
this picturesque, mid-Catskills hamlet of Phoenicia where the Stroud
field crews often dined and shopped
for supplies. One has it, according
to The New Yorker magazine of
Nov. 19, 2001, that it’s illegal to
carry a shovel on Main Street.
That rumor, which isn’t true,
grew out of a much stronger story
that once featured on “Unsolved
Mysteries” and continues to draw
treasure hunters to Phoenicia.
Notorious gangster Dutch
Schultz, says the legend, buried his
illgotten loot in a steel box on the
34
banks of the Esopus Creek somewhere near Phoenicia. Some $50
million is the reputed value of the
gold, diamonds and bonds he
buried. The story is the subject of a
new documentary, “Digging for
Dutch: The Search for the Lost
Treasure of Dutch Schultz.”
7
Plumbing the Ashokan Depths
lines and floats, the boat was launched and the three chugged
off into the mist.
The Ashokan is one of eight of the system’s 19 reservoirs
chosen for algae sampling. The others are the Pepacton,
Cannonsville, Schoharie, Rondout, Neversink, Croton and
Kensico.
Each sampling takes two days. On this, the first day, the
crew spent most of the time setting up three stations at deepwater sites that are representative of conditions on the reservoir.
At each site they did a temperature profile of the water at meter
(3-feet-3-inch) intervals to find the thermocline – the level
where the water temperature drops suddenly. Then they gauged
the light penetration at half-meter intervals until they found the
level that gets only 1 percent of the surface light intensity. At
that depth they measured photosynthesis. By the time they were
finished, the fog had burned off, and the sun had taken a toll on
their skins.
On day two they collected water samples at each of the five
depths measured the day before – at 100 percent light penetration, 50 percent, 25 percent, 10 percent and 1 percent. In the
boat they bubbled nitrogen through the sample to drive off
F
og shrouded the Esopus valley one Wednesday morning
in early August as the big old Stroud Chevrolet Suburban
rumbled across the Ashokan Reservoir weir, a boat in
tow. The van pulled over at the western gate of the reservoir.
Inside were Tom Bott and his crew, Chad Colburn and Bob
Smith. The bridge across the reservoir was barely visible in the
fog. A New York City Department of Environmental Protection
police officer drove up soon after the crew’s arrival to unlock
the gate. The officer parked his car in the middle of the road,
lights flashing, to stop traffic as Bob Smith backed the van and
boat into the fenced off area. Fences and big “no entry” signs
surrounded the reservoir. Security around the reservoir is tight,
as are the rules and regulations governing access. Before they
arrived, Bott and crew had to take the boat to a D.E.P. station
and have the hull and motor thoroughly steam cleaned. The city
watersheds have not yet been invaded by zebra mussels and the
authorities want to keep it this way.
Though still early morning, the weather was already warm
and muggy. Once inside the gate, Smith backed the van and
boat down to the water’s edge. After spending some time loading a plethora of equipment, cooler boxes, sampling bottles,
35
forever disrupted,” Bob Steuding comments in “The Ashokan
Reservoir.” The film was made and distributed by the library of
West Hurley, one of the towns that was moved to higher ground
when the valley was flooded.
At the time it was built, the Ashokan was the biggest reservoir in the world. Billed as “The Last of the Handmade Dams”
– the title of Steuding’s book – the Ashokan was the first of the
city’s west-of-Hudson reservoirs.
Local residents pronounce the name “a shokan” as if it
were two words. As with many other names in the Catskills,
speculation about its origin varies. Steuding likes “place of
many fishes,” which he says is a translation from Indian. Diane
Galusha, in her “Liquid Assets,” writes that Ashokan may
derive from the Indian word “sokan” which means “cross the
creek.”
Compared to its predecessors east of the Hudson, the
Ashokan is gigantic. With a surface area of 12.8 square miles
and a maximum depth of 190 feet, the reservoir holds up to 123
billion gallons of water, more than six times the capacity of the
New Croton.
That amount of water would bury Manhattan to a depth of
30 feet, which “some Esopus residents thought then would be a
D ISRUPTING THE PEACE
good idea,” says Steuding.
More than 2,000 living people were uprooted from the
Once, 100 years ago and a 100 feet below where Bott and
homes. while 2,637 dead bodies were dug up from 40 cemetercrew were floating, a beautiful valley lay along Esopus Creek.
ies to make way for the Ashokan. They had lived and died in 12
History books describe it as a peaceful valley of farms, villages,
villages that lay in the part of the valley that was earmarked for
a railroad and train stations. Then came New York City’s land
the reservoir. Eight of the villages were relocated above the
surveyors and lawyers, and the “peace of the valley would be
water line. The area
of the reservoir was
cleared entirely. All
buildings were razed
and the rubble
moved out, outhouses dug up and their
contents removed,
hundreds of thousands of trees were
taken out – roots,
stumps and all.
But over the
years the bitterness
has faded. Many residents have come to
realize that New
York City’s intervention has helped
preserve the
With the fog lifting from the Ashokan basin, Tom Bott and Chad Colburn guide the boat into the reservoir.
some of the dissolved oxygen to allow the algae to reproduce
and they read the dissolved oxygen from each sample. Then
they poured the samples into three small bottles – two clear bottles and a dark one. The light bottles measure photosynthesis;
the dark one measures the respiration of algae or any other
micro-organisms that may be present. They then put the three
bottles in a holder and suspended them in the water at the depth
from which they were originally taken. They also took samples
at each site for chlorophyll and nutrient levels. This process was
repeated at each station and took all morning. That afternoon
they went back to each station, pulled up the samples, measured
the dissolved oxygen and packed the bottles in coolers to take
back to the lab.
The sampling is designed to determine the “gross primary
productivity” – the net change in the oxygen in the clear bottles
plus the respiration in the dark bottles.
Integrated over the five depths, the sampling gives the areal
estimate of the amount of algal growth at each station; and the
three stations give an estimate for the entire reservoir.
Similar samplings were done at each of the ten integrated
stream sites.
36
Catskills from what it could have been.
One of these is Chester Lyons. Although his family
has lived in the area for hundreds of years and was
directly affected by the building of the Ashokan, he
shows no bitterness. His main complaint about the city is
the way the D.E.P. police do what he feels should be left
to the local police – enforcement of speeding and routine
traffic regulations.
Mr. Lyons lives alone in a modest ranch-style house
in the village of Shokan just off Route 28. A large Stars
& Stripes flutters in front of the house, and inside the
décor is bachelor plain, utilitarian.
Mr. Lyons’ wife died about 12 years ago after a long
battle with multiple sclerosis. He is retired but active in
the community. Among many others things, he is on the
local library committee that produced the video of the
building of the Ashokan. His house is filled with history, From left, Tom Bott, Bob Smith and Chad Colburn prepare the gear to go out
on the Ashokan Reservoir for the afternoon rounds.
and he eagerly shows off a mountain of albums.
Photographs, postcards, press clippings and official and
his injuries had been fatal.
ancestral records, tell the story of the Ashokan and his family’s
Chet Lyons worked for IBM, which had bases in the
part in its history.
region.
He was born in Ashokan in 1927, the seventh generation of
“I grew up in Ashokan near the firehouse. My father had a
his family to live in the immediate area. One of the villages just
garage and sold Chevrolets. The garage burned down in ’37.”
to the south of the Ashokan bears the family name, Lyonsville.
Back then there was only a grammar school in the area, so
He traced his first ancestor in the area to Michael Lyons,
he had to go to Kingston for high school.
who enlisted in and survived the Revolutionary War. After he
“Don’t know what the place would be like if the reservoir
had returned from fighting the British, however, he was serioushadn’t been built. . . . They made a beautiful thing out of it.”
ly wounded while “scouting for Indians.” The government paid
His ties are not only through past generations – many of his
his wife $85 a year for the rest of her life, presumably because
friends and neighbors were also directly affected. “The barber
who used to cut my hair lived in West Shokan and had to move
to Ashokan.”
He talked about how some people thrived and were content
with the building of the Ashokan. But others – those who had
businesses and commercial properties – were not happy.
His mother was from Olive Branch, one of the towns taken
over for the reservoir. But if his parents were bitter, they had
not passed it on to their seven children. He couldn’t even
remember if the subject had ever come up around the dinner
table.
Many of the photographs Mr. Lyons showed were from the
hundreds of glass negatives taken by his wife’s grandfather,
who had photographed the building of the dam.
Among them are detailed black and white panoramas of the
dam wall going up with great gantries of scaffolding and cranes
and mules hauling construction materials.
The crew heads out into the west basin. In the background is the
There were also photographs of Bishops Falls and West
weir that divides the Ashokan into its east and west basins. A public
Shokan. The falls are now permanently under water, and West
road runs along the top of the weir.
37
The colony was based on the utopian ideals
Shokan was one of the villages that were
of the English art critic, John Ruskin, and
picked up and moved beyond the reach of
the social reformer, William Morris. Its
the water.
Mr. Lyons’ great-grandfather-in-law
founder, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, who
Zacharich Palen owned the farm where
had been a student of Ruskin’s at Oxford,
the fountain is now. It was known as Old
also brought with him his belief in peace
Brown Station before the Ashokan overand folk music. Woodstock’s reputation as
whelmed it and the railroad.
a folk music center attracted famous
He pointed to an old picture of the
singers, such as Huddie Ledbetter, better
town of Ashton which was lost to the
known as Leadbelly, in the 1930s and Pete
reservoir.
Seeger in the 1940s. Then Joan Baez setTurning the page to another phototled in town, followed by Peter, Paul and
graph – a plain clapboard building – he
Mary.
said, “My father ran that as a store in
By the time Bob Dylan arrived to take
1940.”
up residence in the 1960s, Woodstock was
He remembers in the drought of 1982
a haven for the growing hippie movement,
when “you could almost walk across the
much to the horror of many of the other
Chester “Chet” Lyons at his home in
whole thing [the Ashokan].”
residents. Communes sprang up and the
Shokan. His family has lived in the
He flipped the page to a photo of the
mountain air around Woodstock’s village
Ashokan area for hundreds of years. His
original aerator, which he said was a
green rang to the twanging of guitars and
mother grew up in the valley that now lies
favorite gathering place on weekends and
the smell of marijuana smoke and incense.
on the bottom of the reservoir.
evenings. “We all went over there. My
And tourists flocked to the town to gawk at
mother would make potato salad . . . and
the hippies and flower children and to
we would go there. On hot summer nights people would come
breathe the same air as Bob Dylan, who lived in a secluded
out of Kingston,” he said, the city on the Hudson that is the
mountaintop retreat above town.
Ulster County seat.
The older residents of Woodstock were so appalled that
The aerator has since been replaced by a fountain. Though
they declared what has become known as the “Anti-hippie
described as “visually stunning” by Diane Galusha, the aerator’s
War.”
primary function was a practical one. Some 376 million gallons
Ordinances were passed to restrict free movement of people
were pumped through it daily and the water was sprayed 40 to
in the fields and woods. Camping was forbidden, as was the
60 feet into the air from pipes that lined the bottom of the 500right to assemble peacefully.
foot-by-250-foot aeration basin. Its purpose was to oxidize the
“The police made false arrests, clubbed men and women
water to remove bad tastes and odors.
standing quietly on the village green, and maintained a continuous program of petty harassment,” writes Alf Evers in his
W OODSTOCK
“From Woodstock to Wilderness.”
“The town’s official newspaper campaigned vigorously
While few people outside New York would recognize the
against
what it called ‘the undesirable element.”
name Ashokan, just about everyone in North America and much
It became obvious to those planning the Woodstock Music
of the world knows the name of the village just three miles
&
Art
Fair, that their festival would not be welcome. So they
north of the reservoir. Woodstock gave its name – very much
took
the
name and sought more friendly grounds beyond the
against its citizens’ wills – to the historic music festival of 1969.
town limits. After one false start and with ticket sales already
In fact, the town fathers even contemplated going to court to
soaring past 50,000, the organizers found a farm in Bethel,
block the festival from using the name. But they relented, probabout 40 miles southwest of Woodstock as the crow flies, and at
ably realizing that the town had itself stolen the name from the
least 60 miles by road. The rest is history, as nearly half a miloriginal Woodstock in England.
lion young people converged on Max Yasgur’s farm for several
The idea for the music festival did, in fact, originate in
days, while most residents locked their doors in horror. The fine
Woodstock, which had been an art and music center since the
print of history also records that the unfortunate town official
Byrdcliffe arts and crafts colony was founded there in 1902.
38
who approved the festival was summarily kicked out of office
at the next election.
Back in Woodstock, the residents were still shaking their
heads. But not for long. Things started to change, as
Woodstock’s demographics took a left turn with the influx of
new residents, probably including some of those hippies from
the festival who had since grown up and settled down with
their families. A recent item in the biweekly “Woodstock
Journal” confirms the reversal.
Under a headline “The Shift in Voter Registration in
Woodstock,” the piece listed these figures without explanation
or comment:
1968: Democrats 532 – Republicans 1661
1972: Democrats 776 – Republicans 1629
1984: Democrats 1522 – Republicans 1377
1999: Democrats 2101 – Republicans 989
Going by the letters to the editor in the Woodstock newspapers, the debate during the 2000 presidential election was not
about Bush vs. Gore – it was about Gore vs. Nader.
The “Woodstock Journal” – a progressive newspaper
whose front page logo says “working for an organic food supply, safe air, non-polluted water, a total end to poverty, national
health care, personal freedom and fun” – urged readers to go to
Boston and get arrested protesting the “disgusting exclusion” of
Ralph Nader from the presidential candidate debates.
The other Woodstock newspaper, the “Woodstock Times,”
a fat and obviously lucrative weekly, is also quite progressive in
its opinions and news coverage.
While Woodstock is an exception, as their demographics
change, there are signs that some of the hamlets west of
Woodstock, such as Phoenicia and Pine Hill, are beginning to
follow its lead.
Generally, however, the Catskills resembles the demographics of much of rural upstate New York – predominantly
conservative and Republican.
Even Chet Lyons, who lives a few miles down the road
from Woodstock, confirms the tradition of Republicanism in the
region.
“I’m a Republican because my father was a Republican,
just as I’m a Methodist because my father was a Methodist.”
He supported George Bush during the presidential election
and felt that Hillary Clinton was a carpetbagger.
As the election results showed, the further west a visitor
drives from the Hudson, the more Republican the local politics.
Aaron Bennett, who grew up in the Catskills and still lives
near Oliverea in the park, said his high school mates often
The fountain below the Ashokan Reservoir wall replaced the
aerator which used to be a favorite picnic place for area residents on hot summer evenings and weekends.
joked about traveling through a “time warp” when they drove
west over the hill that marks the beginning of Delaware County.
Bennett, at 27, is part of a younger generation, most of
whom choose to leave the Catskills to seek work and excitement elsewhere. Those like himself who stayed show little sign
of the bitterness of the past.
“We didn’t even learn about [the takeover of their ancestors’ homes and land for the reservoirs] in high school,” said
Bennett.
He stayed in the area because he loves nature and the
woods and streams where he played as a child. He was also
lucky, not only to find a job in the Catskills but one that fit his
love of the outdoors and his college qualifications in the environmental sciences. He works for the Catskill Center for
39
Conservation and Development. The Arkville-based nonprofit organization is an advocate for the environmental
and economic health of the region. Education is a major
part of its mission, and it produces detailed environmental,
geological and cultural guides for teachers to use in
schools. It also advocates for the preservation of the
Catskills. Much of its educational material can be downloaded from the Internet at www.catskillcenter.org.
L AST
HANDMADE DAM
The completion of the Ashokan Reservoir on June 19,
1914, marked the end of an era. The Ashokan really was
“The Last of the Handmade Dams.” A month later, World
War I broke out.
Today, the village of Woodstock is laid back and trendy, a popular tourist attraction
and home to many well-known musicians and artists.
40
8
Boosting Morale
no worse than usual for field work. In fact, conditions in New
y mid-summer of 2000 the enchantment of the Catskill
York were quite comfortable compared to some of the Center’s
Mountains was wearing thin for the field staffers. Their
previous big projects and he thought it might help to share
spirits were flagging, and they were having trouble seesome of those experiences. On a whim, Sweeney called the
ing the light at the end of the season. On top of the long work
entire staff together.
days and time spent away from their homes, everything seemed
Monday mornings were usually a time for the field staff to
to be going wrong. For one, the Catskills’ notorious weather
regroup at the Avondale laboratory and prepare (and repair) the
was playing havoc with their schedule – they had planned to
tons of monitoring equipment they lugged up to New York. So
finish the first year’s sampling by the end of September. It
most of them were at the lab, and it was a good time to talk to
seemed to the staff that they were being plagued by one disasthem.
ter after another. If it wasn’t a storm, it was a vehicle breaking
With the help of a projector, Sweeney told them about two
down. And in the middle of this they discovered that the Ford
big projects the Stroud Center had run in the 1970s and 1980s.
Explorer they used in New York had a set of BridgestoneIn the River Continuum project of the ’70s, Stroud scienFirestone killer tires.
tists studied four major American rivers. Study sites were often
Some staff members were even questioning whether the
in the remotest parts of the country where there was neither
New York project was worth
the effort. They were starting
to grumble about niggling matters, such as their accommodation and quality of the local
restaurants.
Word of the plunging
morale was getting back to
Bern Sweeney at the Stroud
Center. One Monday morning
in late August he mulled over
the problems in New York.
The previous week had
brought another rainout, and
the field staffers were feeling
particularly low. While he
sympathized, he felt the difficulties they were having were
The Stroud Center’s traveling lab on the Salmon River.
B
41
electricity nor hotels.
“We just had to camp out,” said Sweeney. “Some of the
sites were so remote that you had to boat into them.”
The sampling was done through all four seasons of the year
in the toughest conditions – in snow and in rain.
Similar conditions prevailed for the Stroud scientists
involved in the Thermal Equilibrium project. They studied 30
streams in the East, from Florida to Quebec.
“And we didn’t have enough money to budget for hotel
rooms – even if there were hotels in the region. Everyone was
given a tent and told to bring their own sleeping gear, given
some money to buy food and some equipment to cook with.
And that was that. There was no such thing as per diems, the
whole bit, showers and so forth.”
In the first year of the New York project the field staffers
received $38 a day for meals plus hotel accommodations.
There were no cell phones back them. If a field staffer got
into trouble he either had to solve it himself or hike out to a pay
phone and call in.
Sweeney recalled getting a call from Caroll Burgoon in
Virginia. He and another field scientist had been camping in the
mountains when they were rudely awakened in the middle of
the night with their pup tent collapsed under the weight of 12
inches of snow from an unexpected April storm.
“This isn’t fun anymore,” Burgoon told Sweeney.
“You talk about difficult field conditions,” Sweeney told
the staff. “You try sampling in the winter in Idaho when you
have to dig down through 10 feet of snow, hack through ice to
get to your stream to sample. Or being up in Maine and taking
a sample from a stream and putting it into a pan of water and
have your pan freeze and have to thaw it before you can extract
the macroinvertebrates that you had collected.”
In fact, Bern Sweeney had only scratched the surface of the
horror stories from past sampling trips. Staffers David Funk and
Bernard Anderson recall times when they were camping out in
Idaho or Maine in subzero temperatures, They would boil water
for coffee, turn around and it find it frozen.
In a remote mountain area in Virginia, Funk got into a
sticky situation at the end of a shotgun in the hands of a suspicious “hillbilly.”
Then there was the time when Bern Anderson, a licensed
diver, thought the end had come for him. He was diving in the
Potomac during the spring floods. His job was to take the benthic sampler to the bottom, and he’d been in the water for about
40 minutes and was exhausted from battling the swift current.
He got tangled in the ropes that his team had rigged for the
sampler, he couldn’t get to the surface and he had only four
minutes of air left in his tank. So he went back to the bottom
and rested until he had enough strength to untangle the ropes.
Another time he was swept down in a rapid in Idaho. He
managed to dump all his samples and gear, except for the air
tank, which could easily explode if it got punctured by a sharp
rock. His diving mate managed to get out and and down the
bank, fully expecting to have to pick him up in pieces at the
bottom. Bern Anderson was lucky.
“Camping out there was fun,” said Dave Funk, the lab’s
jack-of-all-trades assistant director. Of course, when he’s working back at the lab, Funk regularly jumps into the creek during
his lunch hour, even on the iciest and snowiest days of winter.
N OT
QUITTERS
The message Sweeney was conveying was that, “Yes, the
logistics in the current New York project are fairly difficult, but
they are not insurmountable. We’ve been there before under
more trying circumstances. We were not quitters then and we
were successful, and we’re not quitters now. We must focus on
the problems were having and get on with it.”
The field staffers reacted positively to the pep talk. Several
of them came up to Bern Sweeney after the meeting with ideas
for solving problems they were experiencing. In any case, the
New York project swung back into action with renewed vigor.
In the second year, things went better. The weather was
more cooperative. They’d completed half a dozen spiraling
experiments by the end of July. The Center’s ailing vehicle fleet
was upgraded, and the sampling gear worked without any major
hitches. The central lodging in the Catskills was also
changed to a place with friendly management. The
teams have learned to keep meticulous check lists so
they don’t forget critical gear. The Center also hired
more interns to help ease the work load and bought a
Global Positioning System that allows the spiraling
crews to download precise readings of the sampling
stations directly into the databases.
“We’re better organized,” said Sweeney. “There’s
Roughing it in the snow. The Stroud Center sampling crew’s base camp
still a lot of travel and a lot of time.”
along the Salmon River in 1977.
42
9
Fossil Forests of the Schoharie
attacked her with ruffled outrage.
Still, she said, it was “not as bad as I thought it would be” although, when pressed, she didn’t seem quite ready to commit
to this as a career.
S
ummer intern Natalie Morrison was the one Stroud field
worker who did most of her sampling on dry ground. In
fact, her job was quite down to earth: She spent the summer collecting feces. She visited kennels and animal hospitals
for cat and dog samples and barnyards for farm animal manure.
Human wastes she would collect from sewage treatment plants
and hospitals in the watershed.
Morrison is a senior at one of the many upstate campuses
of the State University of New York, where she is biology
major. She found out from her adviser that Stroud organic
chemist Laurel Standley was looking for summer interns to help
out.
“I thought it would be a chance to see what jobs there are.
I’m not sure what I want to do when I get out of school,” she
said.
The job wasn’t exactly romantic, though it had its
moments, and she did manage to ruffle some feathers. Besides
raising the suspicions of some farmers, a laying hen took violent exception to Morrison’s presence in her chicken coop and
F OSSIL
FORESTS
The coop where Morrison had her run-in with the hen is in
a farming area on the border of Delaware and Schoharie counties, just north of Catskill Park. It is also on the brink of two
major watersheds - the Delaware to the west and the SchoharieMohawk-Hudson to the northeast. To geologists and anthropologists the region is an extravaganza. Just west of the Schoharie
Reservoir is Grand Gorge, which was once a vast 700-foot-deep
lake left by retreating Wisconsin glaciers. But that was only
16,000 years ago. In 1920 the builders of the Schoharie
Reservoir uncovered a 380-million-year-old fossil forest. The
trees, which were up to 40 feet tall, looked like gigantic tree
ferns. But they bore seeds rather than spores and are thought to
43
the people of the Catskills were settling down under the
belief that the great Ashokan Reservoir would finally
quench New York City’s thirst. They were wrong. New
York’s quest for more water was not even half satisfied.
The 350 people who lived in Gilboa and its surroundings, together with their 1,300 buried ancestors, suffered the same fate as the residents of the Esopus valley.
It was déjà vu. The seizure of property and buildings of the Schoharie Reservoir, between 1917 and
1927, caused the same agonized uprooting of established communities as had the process at the Ashokan.
An attentive audience watches Natalie Morrison collect samples
But
as it had elsewhere, it also brought an economic
from a farmyard in the watershed.
boom during the construction period. At the same time,
another engineering feat was underway – workers were
be the first seed-bearing trees on Earth. They grew in the
burrowing a tunnel 2,630 feet under the crest of Balsam
swampy Catskill Delta on the edge of the sea that covered the
Mountain to the Esopus Creek, 18 miles south of the reservoir.
area in the Devonian period.
The resulting Shandaken Tunnel is 11 feet, 6 inches high and 10
By the time the first humans arrived about 8,000 to 10,000
feet, 3 inches wide and carries up to 650 million gallons of
years ago, the great lake was long gone. Instead, those humans,
Schoharie water each day to the Esopus.
thought to be the ancestors of the Mohican, Delaware and
Using the Esopus as a conduit saved the city the expense of
Iroquois tribes, found the U-shaped valleys left by glacial erobuilding the tunnel all the way to the Ashokan. This swells the
sion. The valleys are still there today, but the Indians are gone
Esopus considerably, much to the delight of canoers, tubers and
and the flat areas have been cleared for farms and villages. A
kayakers. But the tunnel water has its problems. Quality is one.
huge man-made lake now fills the valley of the only north-flowAs any passing visitor can see, the water from the tunnel turns
ing stream of the city’s water system, the Schoharie Creek, a
the normally clear-running Esopus cloudy. In particular, trout
tributary of the Mohawk River, which flows into the Hudson
anglers are unhappy about what they see as the increasing turjust north of Albany.
bidity of one of their favorite fishing streams below the tunnel
The dam wall that holds back the water is called Gilboa,
outlet. In March 2000, Trout Unlimited and other fishing and
after the village that once nestled in the valley. Back in 1915
A misty view of Grand Gorge.
44
conservation organizations joined
Riverkeeper to sue New York D.E.P. for
discharging contaminated water into the
Esopus without a permit as required by
the federal Clean Water Act. The plaintiffs
wanted the D.E.P. to obtain a discharge
permit which requires the city to use the
best technology available to reduce suspended solids in the Schoharie water. But
a New York District Court dismissed the
complaint on the grounds that the Clean
Water Act does not prohibit transfer of
polluted water from one water body to
another. Riverkeeper is appealing the
decision.
As with most of the reservoirs, the
Water from the Shandaken Tunnel roars into the Esopus, dramatically increasing the creek’s
view across water and valley is magnifiwater level to the delight of canoers. Environmental organizations, however, worry about
the high sediment content of the Schoharie’s contribution.
cent. A plaque at the Gilboa Dam tells
visitors they are standing 157 miles from
Staten Island, the furthest point of water
service. The reservoir is five miles long and holds 22 billion
gallons when full. The surface area is 1,142 acres; the tributary
watershed 314 square miles.
The Catskills were in full fall leaf color by the time the
Stroud Center’s weather-beleaguered spiraling crew got to
Schoharie Creek in the first week of October. The spiraling site
was in the northern Catskill Park along a particularly scenic
part of the creek, much of which can be seen from Route 23A.
Here the creek runs through mostly open meadows and farmland, just downstream from a huge ski resort where storm water
runoff flows off vast parking lots into the stream.
Across the road from where the spiraling crew was setting
up was a log temple that looked like it had been transplanted
from the Himalayas. Expecting a Buddhist monastery, a visitor
may be surprised to read the sign: St. John the Baptist
Ukrainian Catholic Church. The Catskills are a spiritual haven
with many retreat centers, temples and churches scattered
throughout the mountains and valleys. Around Woodstock, in
particular, there are a number of such places, including the
mountaintop Tibetan Buddhist monastery called the Karma
Triyana Dharmachkra, the North American seat of the Gyalwa
Karmapa, the teenage spiritual leader whose flight from Tibet to
India in 1999 made international headlines. According to a
report in The New York Times of June 18, 2001, the Woodstock
monastery is eagerly awaiting a visit by the Karmapa, who is
believed by his followers to be the reincarnated head of one of
Up to 650 million gallons of water a day gush out of the portal of
the four main branches of Tibetan Buddhism.
the 18-mile-long Shandaken Tunnel.
45
P LUNGING
AHEAD
While the Catskills’ inclement weather was part of the
mystique and lure of mountain retreats, the rain and fog that
October 5 morning was not particularly helpful to the spiraling
crew. But with the season coming to an end, the team decided
to plunge in despite a foreboding forecast of heavy rain by that
afternoon. In an attempt to finish before the rain increased the
water flow, the crew cut short the distance over which the sampling would be done. By the time they were finished, the rain
was pelting down and the crew members were soaked despite
their waders and rain gear. But they got the job done.
A remnant of a 380-million-years-old fossil
giant fern forest dug up during construction of the Schoharie Reservoir on display
near the Gilboa Dam wall.
A farm on the bank of the Schoharie Creek, upstream of the reservoir.
46
10
Rondout & Neversink, Stormy Weather
nature had tired of the décor along the Rondout and decided to
redecorate. Besides removing trees and vegetation and scouring
the banks, whole beaches and rocky islands had shifted, as had
the course of the stream itself. Where a Stroud storm station
once snaked out from the bank into about 3 feet of water, there
was a dry, rocky beach and not a sign of the PVC superstructure and steel anchoring rods.
The Catskills are known for their storms. The area lies
around latitude 42°N and longitude 74° to 75°W and is influenced by both continental and maritime air masses. Thus, in
addition to local thunderstorms, the Catskills get storm fronts
from the west and north and coastal storms from the south, as
well as the occasional nor’easter. But for all the “Sturm und
Drang” of the summer season, it is the winter snowmelt and the
dormant season rains that cause the highest stream flows.
Average annual precipitation is 47 inches, which is why the
Catskills and Delaware watersheds of the New York system
have 2,000 miles of streams and brooks. It is also why the area
was chosen as New York’s water source.
Of course, all this variability and unpredictability of stream
flow makes sampling more challenging for the Stroud Center
crews.
S
torm sampling is yet another part of the Stroud Center’s
New York project. Earlier in the summer, Laurel
Standley, Charles Dow, Lara Martin and Arlene Casas
spent days setting up storm-water sampling stations in the
Neversink and Rondout creeks. Sites have to be chosen with an
eye to accessibility, permission of the landowners and water
flow. One such site was on the Rondout Creek close to where it
enters the reservoir. Sturdy steel rods are sledgehammered into
the rocky stream bed to secure lengths of plastic (PVC) pipe.
Inside the pipes are siphoning tubes, which are run into an
expensive pumping and timing mechanism housed in a barrel
and attached to a tree with chains.
But, as the Stroud crews were soon to discover, storms will
be storms.
On Friday, July 14, 2000, a powerful and noisy weather
system moved in over the rural towns of Olive and Denning
just southwest of the Ashokan, and it started to pour. By the
time the storm was over, nearly a foot of rain had fallen, turning the normally quiet Rondout and Neversink creeks into raging torrents.
When the Stroud spiraling crews returned the following
week, they hardly recognized the Rondout Creek. It was as if
47
U NQUENCHABLE
CITY
Work on the Schoharie Reservoir had
hardly started in 1919, when it was already
obvious to engineers that they would have
to keep finding new sources of water to
keep up with the demands of a rapidly
growing city.
The Rondout Reservoir and its neighbor the Neversink five miles to the west
were the next two dams to be built. Work
on the Rondout began in 1937 and the
Neversink in 1941, although the building
of both was interrupted in 1943 by World
War II. While they are linked by proximity
and aqueduct, the two reservoirs are in
entirely different watersheds. The Rondout
Creek runs east into the Hudson at
Denis Newbold, in waders, and Dave Montgomery prepare their sampling station for a
spiraling exercise in the Rondout Creek.
Kingston. The Neversink Creek rises in the
middle of Catskill Park – just over the
crest of the valley where the Stroud crew lodged – and flows
down Frost Valley in a southwesterly direction. As it leaves
Catskill Park, it turns due south and flows into the Delaware
River at Port Jervis, where the states of New Jersey,
Pennsylvania and New York meet.
In making the jump into a river network that was a
major source of water, transportation and commerce for
three other states, New York was entering a new and bigger
battleground. Besides the by-then routine local fight to take
residents’ land and buildings, the states of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania entered the fray. The interstate dispute would
ultimately go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.
Before & After. These two photographs were taken
from about the same place in the Rondout Creek.
The photographer was standing thigh-deep in the
water when he took the picture above. Less than a
week later, after a massive storm burst on the
upper Rondout watershed, the photographer stood
at the same place but high and dry on a rocky
beach that the storm water had dumped. The
Stroud Center’s New York project coordinator
Charles Dow inspects the damage.
48
The New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures twice
refused to ratify a treaty to allow New York to take water
from the Delaware River. Then, as New York City continued
to plan the dams, New Jersey sued to stop the project permanently. The issue moved to the Supreme Court, which
appointed a special master, Judge Charles Burch of
Memphis, Tennessee, to hold hearings in Trenton,
Philadelphia and New York City.
Finally on May 25, 1931, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes handed down a landmark decision that denied New
Jersey’s suit. But there were conditions. Among them was
the stipulation that New York City would be allowed to take
440 million gallons of water a day from the Delaware – considerably less than the 600 million the city wanted. The city
also had to release water to maintain a specified flow at Port
Jervis. (Both these provisions were amended by the Supreme
Court in 1954 to allow the city to withdraw 800,000 gallons
a day, but to maintain a specified flow at Montague, N.J.)
Confident of victory, New York had continued its plans
to build the Rondout and the Neversink. The state had taken
over several hamlets and surrounding communities, and the
contractors had moved in. But, while properties were
forcibly bought by eminent domain starting in 1936, the valleys were not inundated by water until the early 1950s, as a
result of the war delay. This, of course, further embittered
From front, Charles Dow, Arlene Casas and Laurel Standley install residents who saw their land standing fallow for all those
a stormwater sampling station on the Neversink Creek.
years.
The Merriman Dam wall of the Rondout
Reservoir was finished in 1951, but it took
four years to fill to its capacity of 49.6 billion
gallons. The seven-mile-long reservoir has a
surface area of 2,032 acres on 3,513 acres of
acquired land. Some 1,200 living and 1,600
dead residents were displaced. Although it is
smaller than the Rondout, the city acquired
nearly twice as much property for the neighboring Neversink Reservoir, which was completed in 1953. Only 342 living residents
were moved out. There were no graves. But a
lot of productive farmland and some of the
area’s most famous trout fishing streams were
lost. The Neversink took only two years to
fill to its capacity of 34.9 billion gallons
Clockwise from left front, Bernard Anderson, Chad Colburn (partially hidden),
Denis Newbold, Charles Dow, Tom Bott, Lara Martin and Dave Montgomery prepare for a spiraling exercise in the Rondout Creek.
49
PEPACTON
RESERVOIR
11
Pepacton, the Delaware Giant
state of the ecosystem from a microscopic viewpoint.
Burroughs, of course, was also studying the river’s natural
system as best he could in his day. As he wrote more than 100
years ago, he had great expectations for his trip down the East
Branch – or the Pepacton Branch as it was usually called then –
of the Delaware River. It was the first such trip, he thought, by
a “white man.”
“I should surely surprise Nature and win some new secrets
from her. I should glide down noiselessly upon her and see what
all those willow screens and baffling curves concealed. As a
fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to come to the stream
only at certain points: now the most private and secluded
retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every bend and
eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled by
high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.”
And paddle he did, all the way down to Hancock, where
the East Branch merges with the West Branch to form the
Delaware River. The Pepacton Reservoir back then was not
even a gleam in the New York City water board’s eye. The only
man-made impediments Burroughs encountered were a few
shallow weirs, over which his boat slid quite easily.
He wrote of stopping at farmhouses where he supplemented
T
he Stroud Center’s first spiraling exercise in the New
York City watersheds was done in mid-July along a
well-known trout stream called the Bush Kill. Station 5
was set up just short of where the Bush Kill flows into Dry
Brook at Arkville, a village on the northwestern edge of the
Catskill Forest Park. The spiraling crew members were surprised to find that Dry Brook is not dry at all. On the contrary, it
is quite a substantial stream.
Even the renowned American naturalist John Burroughs,
who was born in 1837 and grew up in the area, was puzzled by
the name. In his volume “Pepacton,” Burroughs wrote about
paddling down the East Branch of the Delaware River:
“It was fit that I put my boat into the water at Arkville, but
it may seem incongruous that I should launch her into Dry
Brook; yet Dry Brook is here a fine large trout stream, and I
soon found its waters were wet enough for all practical purposes. The Delaware is only one mile distant, and I chose this as
the easiest road from the [train] station to it.”
The Stroud crew’s interest in the creek was that it is one of
the main streams of the New York water system’s largest reservoir, the Pepacton, which is thought to be an Indian word meaning “marriage of the waters.” The crew was there to study the
51
51
his diet of trout and wild strawberries
much bitterness to New York City’s
with a quart or two of milk. In his third
drowning of what is still considered the
day of traveling, after passing “the wilds
region’s best farmland.
of Colchester,” he stopped at the “long
The Pepacton is huge. It is bigger
placid eddy at Downsville,” where today
by 40 percent than all twelve of the
stands the huge wall of the Pepacton
Croton system reservoirs put together.
Reservoir, which holds back 140 billion
The reservoir is 21 miles long and
gallons of water that stretches about 18
holds up to 140.2 billion gallons of
miles up the river valley he had once
water. Though 21 square miles of land
paddled down.
were taken for the reservoir, only 974
Burroughs walked up to the village
people were displaced, far less than the
of Downsville to post some letters – the
human toll of some of the earlier resersame village that stands there today
voirs. But the bitterness is far more
below the dam wall. Downsville escaped
evident in the Pepacton area than in all
the fate of its four upstream neighbors,
the other reservoir communities, with
Arena, Pepacton, Shavertown and Union
the possible exception of the
Grove, all of which were expropriated
Cannonsville. This is because the
and flooded.
expropriation and destruction of homes
Besides the wonderful observations
and livelihoods happened during the
of nature for which he became famous in
lifetimes of many of the people who
his day, Burroughs also noted that he
still live in the area.
John
Burroughs
at
work.
passed many farmhouses, spaced about a
(From “Works of John Burroughs”)
‘R APE OF THE C ATSKILLS ’ II
mile apart along the river. Throughout the
mountainous Catskills, the only feasible
Leonard Utter is one of those peofarming was done on the flatlands that occur only in narrow
ple. He was a young man, about 18 years old, when the four
stretches along the rivers.
villages and surrounding farmland were taken over.
The same applies to farming today, which is why there was
Mr. Utter was 68 years old when the Stroud field crews
Burroughs and friend.
(From “Works of John Burroughs”)
first arrived in the Catskills to begin their work. A life-long resident of the Pepacton watershed, Utter remains so bitter he once
told a “National Geographic” interviewer, “If I were to write
my memoirs I would call it ‘The Rape of the Catskills by New
York City.”
Mr. Utter traces his ancestry back to an original settler of
the area – Hermanus DuMond. Six generations of his family
have lived on his farm – including his granddaughter.
He related a colorful story about his great-grandfather who
married a woman from Margaretville. Shortly after the wedding, he went into the Army to fight in the Civil War. He didn’t
know his new wife was pregnant, and when he got back home
four years later he found he had a four-year-old daughter. That’s
when he bought the family farm.
Utter, who readily agreed to talk about having his community taken over for the Pepacton Reservoir, is supervisor for the
Town of Middletown. In New York State’s system of local government, towns are rural municipalities, which may contain any
number of villages. Each town elects a single supervisor who
sits on the county board of supervisors, in addition to chairing
the town board.
so
52
We met in Margaretville, a one-traffic-light town at the
northwestern edge of Catskills Forest Park in eastern Delaware
County. Utter was waiting for me in the Middletown town
clerk’s office on the corner of Margaretville’s main intersection.
He is personable and forthright, and he strode right over to me
as I came in the door and shook my hand with strong, rough
farmer’s hands. He was wearing a faded blue denim shirt with
scuffed color. His blue jeans were also well-worn.
One question set him off - and he kept going with little
prompting. He said his own land was not taken over for the
Pepacton. But the villages taken over were his “childhood community.” He knew all the people. They were his schoolmates,
his fellow fire department members, the stores and service centers he depended on in his work.
“Things were happening so fast we couldn’t believe what
was going on, even though they knew of the plan for years. We
didn’t think it was going to happen,” he said.
In fact, Utter would have been only 5 years old when the
city’s surveyors were in the field in 1937 to plot the course for
the 25-mile-long tunnel between the Rondout and a reservoir
planned on the East Branch in the Downsville area. The city
was hoping to begin building in the early 1940s, but war intervened and the engineers and others were called to duty. Finally,
in 1947 work began on a coffer dam and a tunnel to divert the
East Branch around the dam wall construction area. By the late
1940s the city had begun to expropriate land, move out the residents and dismantle their homes.
Leonard Utter, farmer and supervisor:
“If I were to write my memoirs I would call it
‘The Rape of the Catskills by New York City.”
As Utter put it, people directly involved lost their businesses, had to find new homes and were caught up in the legal
wrangling and compensation.
“It was a very busy and bitter time of their lives.”
He said the older people who were forced out “may have
gotten compensation after a fashion,” but many didn’t live long
after they had moved.
“Even a million dollars, you can’t take it with
you,” he said.
“Many of the people moved away and we
have never seen or heard from them again.”
But many others make a point of remembering what happened. Former Arena residents,
explained Mr. Utter, hold an annual Old Home
Day in the fire hall. People come back from all
over the country to re-establish acquaintances.
One man this year came from Texas, he said,
another from Miami. The latter was just a young
boy when they took the village. He later became a
linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, said Utter.
“The taking of a 25-mile stretch of the
Delaware Valley inflicted a great financial loss to
the surviving communities. This was all prime
farmland, river valleys. . . . Communities like
Margaretville and Downsville suffered. There
were probably 200 farms that were taken . . .
services they utilized no longer needed. This vilFarms still line the East Branch of the Delaware River below the Pepacton Reservoir. lage right here [Margaretville] – car dealers,
53
To Delhi
Pepacton Reservoir
&
surrounding villages
●
Andes
h
28
B
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Ea
Delaware County
Margaretville ●
N
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ra
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kvi
Ar
●
B
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Dr
30
le
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on R e
ns
w
s e rv o ir
act
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ep
D
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●
30
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oo
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28
laware East Branch
ty
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30
machinery dealers . . . all gone. Their livelihood was tied to
farming.
“They started taking land around 1948 [and] continued on
till late 1954 when it was pretty much completed. I was in my
early 20s.
The villages of Union Grove, Shavertown and Pepacton
(the smallest) were also taken.
“I was farming, but they didn’t take my land,” he said, noting, however, that he was directly affected because all the services died out.
The official toll, as recorded in Galusha’s “Liquid Assets,”
was 260 homes, 113 farms, eight churches, eight stores, eight
garages, three taverns, three hotels, eight sawmills, two barber
shops, two water companies, five schools, four post offices, a
Grange hall, a feed store, a fire house and a chiropractor’s
office. A total of 2,371 graves were dug up and moved from 10
cemeteries . A 168-acre dairy farm was bought just to bury 600
unclaimed bodies.
In late 1954 the diversion tunnel was blocked, and water
began to back up behind the Downsville Dam, named after a
nearby village that narrowly missed the fate of its neighbors.
Despite the turmoil and devastation and sad memories,
Utter and many others stayed on in the area. Still a farmer –
though semiretired – Utter became a town supervisor on
January 1, 2000. “A moment of weakness or midlife crisis, but I
got elected.”
No, he said, he wasn’t directly involved with the negotiations that led to the Memorandum of Agreement.
“I’m very, very bitter against New York City. I feel I’m so
bitter I can’t be objective.”
Charles Dow casts for trout in the Bush Kill,
which flows into the Pepacton.
54
He paused, then continued,
“My first reaction to the M.O.A.
was to scrap it. You can’t print
what I said at the time. After I
thought about it for a while . . .
the villages aren’t coming back,
my friends aren’t coming back. If
the communities can get some
monetary compensation, maybe
[the MOA] wasn’t so bad after
all.
“One of the things that bothered me. New York City had the
legal right through eminent
domain to purchase the land, and
they built the reservoir and they
have control. What bothers me . .
The Pepacton Reservoir lies along the northwestern edge of Catskill Park.
. they not only control the land
they bought but have control over
the whole watershed. The regulaultimatum he couldn’t refuse – help the people of the Pepacton
tions they placed on the watershed brought development to a
valley. Gottfried rented a corner of the post office, and business
standstill. The regulatory process we’re under now is mind bogcame pouring in.
gling.”
“Once he came on board - him knowing the ins and outs
But the Pepacton land takeover did begin an era of fairer
available to these people - the tide changed.”
compensation.
Though compensation became fairer, Utter asked rhetori“The first land they condemned and took over – take it or
cally, how do you pay a person who had lived here for 50
leave it,” said Utter. “Maybe the price the city asked for land
years?
was somewhere near market value. But there was no compensaArena had about 100 homes, a municipal water system, a
tion for moving and the trials and tribulations.”
grade school, two grocery stores, a well-stocked hardware
“Then came lawyer Herman Gottfried, who had worked for
store, two churches, an electric store, a couple of garages, etc.
the city and was a specialist in this kind of thing. The local
“About anything anyone wanted, you could buy it there.”
lawyers were good for drawing up wills, etc., but land condemShavertown was a bit smaller. Both had sawmills that
nation was not their specialty,” said Utter.
employed a lot of people, said Utter.
“Mr. Gottfried had seen what was going on. He saw the
“We realize the people of New York City need water,” said
legal avenues available [but] not being used. He told his wife
Utter in a rare concession. “But we feel they could have got it
what was going on,” Utter said, adding that she gave him an
somewhere else – somewhere not so populated, not so fertile.”
River is a treasure
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’
landmark decision includes these famous
lines:
“A river is more than an amenity, it is
a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that
must be rationed among those who have
power over it. New York has the physical
power to cut off all the water within its
substantial interests in the River that must
jurisdiction. But clearly the exercise of
be reconciled as best they may be. The dif-
such a power to the destruction of the
ferent parts of the country may lead to
interest of lower states could not be toler-
varying results but the effort always is to
ated. And on the other hand, equally little
secure an equitable apportionment without
could New Jersey be permitted to require
quibbling over formulas.”
New York to give up its power altogether
in order that the river might come down to
it undiminished. Both sides have real and
55
(From Liquid Assets. By Diane
Galusha.)
His official dealings with the city in the past year have
done little to soften his attitude.
He described them as frustrating and gave this example:
The New York State Police based in the town he supervises
have outgrown their barracks and are moving. “We want to
convince them to stay [in the town]. But finding a place that is
big enough and convenient is being frustrated by the city’s
strict building and land-use regulations. Particularly galling is
the time it takes to get anything done. We may not have time,
and that may preclude any deal we can make.”
“If you’re within a couple of hundred feet of water courses
– forget it. No impervious surfaces, which includes the roof of
a building.
“There’s a tremendous amount of animosity. Anything
New York City tells us – we are very skeptical.”
He described several instances of the city’s refusal to
maintain the bridges, roads and other structures it had built and
for which it was responsible. “They won’t plow roads in the
winters. There’s a stretch of five miles of road that was like a
dog trail up in Alaska,” he said.
Over the years nothing was done – potholes developed and
weren’t repaired. When the roads get too dangerous, he said,
they slap a 35 mph speed limit on it instead of repairing it.
But, said Utter, the Memorandum of Agreement is helping
to change this.
“One of the first things New York City had to do was to
repave roads.”
He recalled a four-to-five-year legal wrangle between New
York State and the city over the bridge on the Pepacton. Little
or no maintenance was done on the bridge and when it was
finally tested, it failed hopelessly - “that’s how close it was to
coming down.
So you wonder why we don’t trust New York City.”
Anyway, he hopes for improvements under the MOA.
Mr. Utter walked me to the door and looked out over
Margaretville’s main street. “It’s different now - different types
of businesses,” he said wistfully. “As this lady told me the
other day, ‘If I wanted an antique I could find plenty in the village. But if I wanted a curtain rod, I had to drive 50 miles to
find one.”
Delaware County farms such as this one are encouraged with full subsidies to install best management practices to prevent
nutrients, herbicides and insecticides from flowing into the watershed streams.
56
12
Cannonsville – Last of the Giants
Economically, Delaware County is the poorest of the
watershed counties. Indeed, with a per-capita annual income of
$15,000, its residents are among the poorest in the state. In the
1990s, when most of the country was booming, Delaware
County’s economy stagnated and its wages decreased. Not surprisingly, then, the county’s political and community leaders are
under pressure to create a better environment for economic
development. And this puts the county at loggerheads with New
York City’s land-use restrictions, which are widely believed
here to discourage investment and development. The city and
environmental organizations argue otherwise, and many on both
sides of the issue are hopeful that the MOA’s funding requirements may help stimulate more investor interest in the county.
Going by John Burroughs’ writings, things haven’t
changed much in Delaware County over the last 100 years.
The naturalist ended his boat journey down the East
Branch with this telling anecdote:
“I passed Partridge Island - which is or used to be the name
of the post-office - unwittingly, and encamped for the night on
an island near Hawk’s Point. I slept in my boat on the beach,
and in the morning my locks were literally wet with the dews
of the night, and my blankets too; so I waited for the sun to dry
R
ising just southwest of Grand Gorge, the Delaware
River West Branch cuts through the middle of the
county that bears its name. Some 14,000 years ago, at
the end of the last ice age, a 700-foot-deep glacial lake broke
out of the gorge and rushed down the valley where the
Delaware rises. The turbulence is long gone, replaced by a tranquil valley of rolling hills and a meandering stream. The land
now is undulating and decidedly pastoral, with farms, villages
and hamlets dotted along the river’s banks.
L AZIO
COUNTRY
But something else was flooding the roadsides and front
yards of this quiet valley in the fall of the year 2000 as the
Stroud Center field scientists sampled the western-most streams
of the watersheds. Election signs were everywhere. And going
by the numbers, candidate Rick Lazio was the overwhelming
favorite for the United States Senate. A stranger may not have
realized Mr. Lazio even had an opponent. Occasionally a lonely
sign sporting the name “Hillary” popped out of the crowd. Just
Hillary - no last name. Whoever this Hillary was, she didn’t
have much of a chance, the stranger may have thought.
57
them. As I was gathering driftwood for a fire, a voice came over
from the shadows of the east shore: ‘Seems to me you lay abed
pretty late!’
‘I call this early,’ I rejoined, glancing at the sun.
‘Wall, it may be airly in the forenoon, but it ain’t very airly
in the mornin;’ a distinction I was forced to admit. Before I had
reembarked some cows came down to the shore, and I watched
them ford the river to the island. They did it with great ease and
precision.”
Mr. Burroughs finished his boat trip in Hancock, where the
east and west branches merge to form the Delaware River. The
two branches run more or less parallel with each other from east
to west. At a point where the village of Deposit now lies, the
West Branch makes a sharp turn south, bends gently to the
southeast and joins the East Branch about 16 miles downstream.
It was at Deposit — where Burroughs spent a few “idyllic
days” after his trip with friends in “a haven as peaceful and perfect as voyager ever came to port in” — that the most dramatic
changes have happened. For it is here that New York City chose
to build its last reservoir, the Cannonsville. Constructed
between 1955 and 1967, with a capacity of 96 billion gallons,
the Cannonsville is the third largest reservoir in New York
City’s water system.
Like the Pepacton, the Cannonsville is named after one of
the villages it drowned. In all, the city took 19,910 acres, 74
farms, six stores, three post offices, four schools, two hotels,
three restaurants and a community hall, for the reservoir that
stretches about 16 miles up the West Branch valley. Besides
Cannonsville, the reservoir also inundated the communities of
Beerston, Rock Royal, Granton and Rock Rift. More than 2,000
graves from 11 cemeteries, were dug up and the remains relocated, according to Galusha’s “Liquid Assets.”
But though the Cannonsville is the newest dam, its waters
are the most polluted of the west-of-Hudson reservoirs. In fact,
at the time of this writing, the watershed was under a phosphorous restriction, which means that no new or expanded wastewater treatment plants can be built in the basin, unless the
amount of phosphorous discharged is offset by a reduction
somewhere else in the basin.
Despite its youth, the Cannonsville Reservoir looks like an
established lake whose fingers form coves and beaches among
the scenic western foothills of the Catskills. The West Branch,
its main feeder stream, meanders down from the northwestern
Catskills in a southwesterly direction across the entire county.
Most of the land it traverses is farmland, though it also slices
through the center Delhi, the Delaware County seat,, and the
village of Walton.
The towns and villages of
Delaware County were
almost solidly behind
Rick Lazio in the 2000
race for the U.S. Senate,
which drew national
attention. Lazio signs, left,
lined the main street of
the village of Andes. A
solitary “Hillary” sign was
tucked well back from the
same street.
58
F INAL
indirectly. As I watch, cows periodically arch their backs and let
loose with streams of urine and manure. And there is nothing to
prevent the stormwater runoff from the open barnyard about
100 yards uphill from flowing directly into the stream.
Although some 90 percent of the farmers have signed onto voluntary best-management practices financed by New York City
under the MOA, a few continue to resist making any improvements.
Difficult to pinpoint and control, badly managed farms
such as this one are believed to be a major source of the phosphorous that plagues the Cannonsville Reservoir.
In town this day, two figures in waders are huddled in midstream of the West Branch where it runs along the bottom edge
of the county courthouse’s large paved parking lot. One of them
is Charles Dow, the project coordinator, who is taking “transects.” A measuring tape runs across the stream, and Dow
moves along the line, measuring and peering into the stream
through the transparent bottom of a plastic bucket. He calls out
numbers to Jessie Mathisen, who jots the information on a pad.
Chad Colburn arrives and starts collecting samples for
chlorophyll analysis. He scrapes algae off underwater rocks into
an Oak Ridge tube, a round-bottomed container made from
high-density polyethylene designed for use in a centrifuge. On
the bank, a monarch butterfly flitters among the goldenrods that
line the stream. It’s the last week of October, and the monarch
still has thousands of miles to fly to reach its wintering grounds
in Mexico. But like the farming community it was passing
FLING
On two clear and unseasonably warm days at the end of
October 2000, the spiraling group was in Delhi, setting up and
conducting its last exercise of the season.
It’s a long winding drive from the Catskills lodge where the
Stroud crews stay. From Margaretville, Route 28 meanders up a
mountain pass and down into the village of Andes, a remote
country hamlet surrounded by hills and farms. Though scenically attractive, the farmland looks poor. The only flat areas are the
narrow strips along streams and valley bottoms. From Andes,
which is in the Pepacton watershed, the road continues up
another pass and down into the valley of the Delaware River’s
West Branch.
Delhi is an attractive village nestled among the hills of the
upper West Branch. It is a true rural center with dairy farms
nudging the town limits. The village is dominated by a square,
which is overlooked by the county courthouse and other buildings typical of a town center. The traditional look of the center
is offset by the sprawling modern buildings of the State
University of New York campus perched on a hillside at Delhi’s
edge.
The West Branch runs through the middle of the village
like a backbone, ribbed with parking lots, school sports fields
and driveways to homes on the river’s bank. Just upstream of
town, a herd of dairy cows browses along the river bank.
Unfenced on this farm, the river is the herd’s main drinking
source. The stream also serves as the herd’s sewer, directly and
The Delaware County seat and agricultural center, Delhi, is nestled among the trees in
the West Branch valley upstream from the Cannonsville Reservoir.
59
As idyllic as it looks, this scene on the West Branch just upstream of Delhi is one of the many problems New York City faces in trying to keep nutrients out of the streams that feed the Cannonsville Reservoir. Although farmers can be fully compensated for
installing fences and other measures to prevent cow manure from entering the stream, some have chosen not to cooperate.
through, it seemed in no hurry.
Soon the setting sun turns the sky a breathtaking red,
which is reflected in the water as the crews pack up for the day
and make the hour’s drive back to the lodge. The next day they
are back in Delhi. It’s another lovely day. The Stroud team sets
up an injection site in the stream on the northern edge of town
next to the Delhi High School football team’s practice field.
Upstream, the cows are back on the bank, browsing, sleeping,
drinking. As if on cue, one arches its back and lets out a stream
of manure as I photograph the scene.
In spite of the cows’ activities, the water is clear by the
time it reaches the edge of town a mile downstream, where the
Stroud crew is going through the final tweaks to the spiraling
injection equipment.
Half an hour later the team is ready. Everything is going
like clockwork this time. Lara Martin does a count down as
Charlie Dow turns on the propane. Rhodamine billows from
just below where Martin is standing in the water. The head of
the red plume moves off quite fast and beats me to the first station about 100 meters downstream, where Chad Colburn stands
ready to take his samples.
Aaron Bennett, Catskill region watershed coordinator for
the Catskill Center in Arkville, arrives to watch. Spiraling is a
new sampling technique to the New York area, and it was drawing the interest of environmental scientists such as Bennett.
T HE
LAST RESERVOIR
The drive down Route 10 follows the West Branch to
Walton past dairy farms perched on the sides of hills and cows
idling in barnyards and fields. At Walton, Route 206 runs north
to the tiny hamlet of Trout Creek. On the side of a long hill that
descends into Trout Creek, a modest red house sits in a grove of
60
conifers. This is the home of Perry Shelton, the 82-year-old
Despite this, Cannonsville has been a difficult reservoir for
president of the Catskill Watershed Corporation, an organizathe city, which has had to put restrictions on the basin in an
tion formed to run the environmental, economic and educationeffort to curb phosphorous pollution.
al programs called for in the Memorandum of Agreement. He
“If we wanted a big industry here, we couldn’t do it –
lives alone in the house, which is on sloping ground. A brook in
mainly because of the treatment plant. Walton sewage treatment
his backyard runs down to the Cannonsville Reservoir, just a
plant is running at capacity. Hobart has a big pharmaceutical
few miles away. Across the road is the family farm his brother
company. The Route 10 corridor has our best industries,”
runs.
Shelton said. Many of Delaware County’s leaders argue that the
Shelton was the supervisor of the Town of Tompkins durcity’s restrictions against expanding or building new sewage
ing its bitter battle to stop New York City from taking 25 pertreatment plants prevent much-needed growth and development
cent of its land for the Cannonsville.
in the economically depressed region.
He was born in Missouri and had moved to the area with
But Shelton was more sanguine about the Memorandum of
his family when he was about 4 or 5 months old. His family
Agreement. “I have not heard any farmers around here comowned a dairy farm “back when a 30-cow farm was good.
plaining about the MOA.” He said his brother across the road
Today if you don’t have 100 head and level land . . .” His voice
had used MOA funding to build new fences, a cement barnyard
trails off, but his meaning is clear.
and underground storage for manure. The fences stop cows
While his brother managed the family farm, he had worked
from drinking in the streams. “We had to have 85 percent coopfor the Bendix Corp. as a tool and die maker for 20 years and in
eration of farmers [under the MOA] and I think they’ve got that
management for another 20 years. He said the company had
. . . but there’s always an old redneck,” he said, referring to the
made about 90 percent of the magnetos
holdouts.
for planes in World War II.
“As far as I know they [provide fundThough he and the family farm
ing] for all farmers who want it,” said
were outside the “taking” area for the
Shelton.
Cannonsville Reservoir, Shelton was
“When the city does something good,
deeply involved in the process – as the
there’s always a reason. They’d rather see
town supervisor, a neighbor and a mema farm here than 50 houses with septic
ber of the community.
systems.”
He was supervisor of Tompkins for
Shelton’s skepticism about the city’s
36 years, from 1958 through 1993. He
motives are the result of years of being on
was also county budget officer for 23
the front line of the battle between the
years.
city and the watershed towns.
“We’d just got through one big takUntil the late 1980s, enforcement of
ing in the East Branch. Then they came
New York City’s land-use rules over the
through to the West Branch. The people
vast watershed had been relatively
of Delaware County were quite worked
relaxed. But federal regulations were
up about it,” he said.
tightened after adoption of the Clean
“Cannonsville took 50 farms - all
Water Act Amendments of 1986. To
river flat.” Many other farms and busienforce the act, the EPA issued the
nesses were closed down.
Surface Water Treatment Rule in 1989,
Tompkins covers 64,000 acres and
which required all surface drinking water,
New York City acquired 16,000 acres
such as reservoirs, to be filtered unless
of it for the reservoir. The Town of
the water suppliers proved they could
Deposit lost about 4,000 acres.
properly protect the watersheds.
“They [New York City] got
At the time the city estimated it
smarter” with Cannonsville. “They took
would cost about $6 billion to build a filmuch more land than with Pepacton,”
tering system for the Catskills-Delaware
A cow demonstrates why streams
which is a bigger reservoir.
system. The city chose the filtrationshould be fenced.
61
Lara Martin and Charles Dow tweak the injection gear as the solution billows out into the stream, leaving a trail of red from the
rhodamine dye used to track the injected mixture as it flows downstream.
avoidance route and tightened its rules without consulting the
residents, municipalities and businesses of the watershed.
The city’s attempted crackdown sparked an angry backlash
that reached a peak in the spring of 1991 when the towns and
villages of the west-of-Hudson watershed organized under the
Coalition of Watershed Towns.
Shelton was chairman of the coalition. When negotiations
that led to the MOA began, “we started off yelling at each
other.”
But relations with the city improved somewhat under the
administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“When Giuliani became mayor, he appointed Mrs.
[Marilyn] Gelber as commissioner of DEP. She was a capable
woman,” said Shelton, noting that she had even visited him at
his house.
“She set a whole new tone to the negotiations.”
Environmental organizations such as Riverkeeper also got
involved. But most of the pressure on the city came from the
E.P.A.’s threat to force New York to filter its water at enormous
cost – five times more than the $1.2 billion it had committed to
Passersby in Delhi may have thought this man was a little odd. Actually it is Charles Dow, and he is taking “transects’ – inspecting the bottom of the West Branch through a bucket with a transparent bottom.
62
watershed protection programs under the
leave. Historic buildings and villages
MOA.
were taken.
The negotiations culminated in 1996
“They were brutal.”
with the public release of the MOA.
People thought it couldn’t happen
Now, said Shelton, “relations with city
twice. Some who had been taken over
are much better.”
in Pepacton bought in Cannonsville,
But it will probably take another generand they were taken again.
ation to heal the wounds of the land
Some people wanted to get out,
takeover for the Cannonsville.
said Shelton. Others were resigned to
Mr. Shelton shakes his head as he
their fate and didn’t argue. There were
remembers those days.
those who didn’t want to go. “And
Take the Turner family, he said. “I
there were those who went kicking and
went to school with Mrs. Turner. All they
screaming. But it’s an old story –
got [for their property] was the assessed
divide and conquer.
value and they had to get off . . . and had to
“Giuliani apologized to us up in
Perry Shelton, one of the leaders of the battle to Kingston after Mrs. Gilbert went back
find another farm. They had to take out a
stop New York City from taking prime farmland
loan for their farm and waited years for the
and reported to him. He apologized for
for the Cannonsville Reservoir now chairs the
money to come through from New York
the way people had been treated up
organization charged with overseeing the
City.”
here,” said Shelton.
Memorandum of Agreement programs.
He remembered others, including the
“There’s a big difference between
Lewises who had three farms, a big boardthen and now. Now we’re talking.
ing house, store, machine shops and acres of land.
Back then, the [D.E.P.] commissioner wouldn’t even talk to me
“This was a very unhappy time for a lot of people. Some
when I called. Today it’s much different.”
had lived in the taken area all their lives and didn’t want to
“Now we’re trying to smooth things out and trying to
improve the watershed for all of us. I
think we came out of it really good.”
He referred to the $368,000 in “good
neighbor” grant money, which paid for
new ambulances and equipment for the
emergency squad. The city also paid the
legal fees of residents affected by the land
acquisitions.
“Before, we were having bake sales,
etc. to get money for legal [fees]. It was
really quite an involved process. We were
fortunate to have good lawyers with
experience.
“Eventually we made some really
good friends with the city.”
“Condemnation,” he said was the
worst. “They come along with a great big
board and tacked it up on your property
and you had to move.
“[The city officials] never came near
- they sent their lawyers. Maybe they [felt
they] would have been strung up.”
Parking lots such as this one at the Delaware County Courthouse are quite common on the
But the atmosphere is calmer now.
banks of the East Branch as it flows through Delhi.
“There comes a time when you have
63
to let bygones be bygones.”
Shelton said he had “learned a lot” from being involved in
the process. “I learned a lot,” he repeated, adding, “anything
someone does upstream affects those who live downstream.”
D IFFERENT
dreams lie buried in that water, the view massages the mind. At
a roadside pulloff overlooking the reservoir, this visitor paused
to watch loons fishing, a young bald eagle fly over the water
and a pileated woodpecker tap loudly on an aspen.
But just past the dam wall and around the next hill, the
country road intersects with a ramp that takes the visitor onto a
multilane highway, Route 17. Soon he is at the outskirts of
Binghampton, with its heavy traffic, shopping malls and factories. Two worlds – so close, yet so far.
WORLDS
The road down from Shelton’s house arrives, after some
twists, turns and detours, at the Cannonsville Reservoir. Few
natural scenes are equal to an expanse of water set in a relatively pristine landscape of hills and valleys. The Cannonsville,
despite its relative newness, is no exception. For someone not
embittered by the fact that people’s farms, livelihoods and
Aspen and birch line a bank of the Cannonsville Reservoir.
64
13
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
opening of a new exhibition of historical photographs and
drawings of the water system, according to a January 8, 2001
report in “The New York Times.” “These days we are losing
one person per mile, so imagine what it was like with the immigrant laborers of the 19th century.” In the 23 years since the
Water Tunnel 3 project began, 20 sandhogs, two engineers and
two inspectors have been killed while working in the tunnel.
“You couldn’t have the water without the sandhogs,”
Richard T. Fitzsimmons told the “Times” at the same exhibition. Fitzsimmons, now the business manager of the 700-member Local 147 of the Tunnel Workers Union, is third-generation
sandhog who first began working on Water Tunnel 3 in 1978.
‘’You know about the danger going in, and then there’s the
respiratory illnesses and, well, we have a lot of guys without
fingers,’’ he added. For their efforts they earn $100,000 a year,
including pension and benefits, for a 40-hour week, “and 40
hours in the tunnel is enough, let me tell you.”
The work has always been dangerous, but the pay wasn’t
nearly so good back in the 1830s when the first Croton
Aqueduct was built. The workers – mostly Irish immigrants –
were paid as little as 68 cents for a ten-hour day. This aqueduct
ran alongside the Hudson. Most of the brick and stoned-lined
conduit was buried from 15 to 30 feet deep in trenches. It
spanned small streams on stone culverts. Crossing the Harlem
River, though, was a major feat that resulted in the majestic
High Bridge that, though no longer used, remains in place
today. A recently renovated park at the site has sparked new
interest in the historic bridge.
Within 40 years the city had outgrown the old Croton
Reservoir and Aqueduct and they were replaced. When the new
Croton Aqueduct, which remains in service to this day, was finished in 1893, it tripled the capacity of the old one. The horse-
N
ew York City’s 19 reservoirs and three lakes are the
glamorous facade of its water system. They are scenic
paradises. Bald eagles nest on their shores and fish in
their waters; loons, the symbols of wilderness waters, are a
common sight; and the wooded banks teem with birds and other
wildlife. People can fish the waters and hike around the edges.
Hunting is also permitted in parts of the thousands of acres of
city-owned surrounding woodlands.
Highly visible and accessible, these vast stretches of open
water get all the public attention.
But buried deep underground out of sight and out of the
public mind – and hopefully safe from saboteurs – is a vast network of aqueducts and tunnels that are absolutely critical to the
functioning of the system. These huge arteries provide the city
with its life’s blood. In each phase of construction the aqueducts
were always the first to be built. And though the city stopped
building new reservoirs more than 30 years ago, tunnel construction continues today and will go on well into the future at
great cost in human life, energy and money.
Hundreds of feet under the city, sandhogs are digging a
tunnel that is being hailed as the most important of the city’s
public works to date. When it is finished in about 2025, it will
improve water pressure and carry water to four of the city’s five
boroughs. The $6 billion Water Tunnel No. 3, as it is officially
called, will also allow the city to temporarily close two critical
tunnels that have never been inspected since they were built
about 100 years ago.
The aqueducts, and the sandhogs who built them, are the
unsung heroes of the New York water system.
“No one knows how many died creating the tunnels and
reservoirs,” D.E.P. Commissioner Joel A. Miele Sr. said at the
65
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66
Nassau County
shoe-shaped tunnel is 13 feet by 13 feet and can
carry 800 million gallons of water a day. But
though more modern blasting methods and
equipment were used, the work was as dangerous as ever. Ninety-two workers died while
building the 33-mile aqueduct. Twenty-four
miles of the aqueduct - from the Croton to
Jerome Park in the Bronx - is a tunnel blasted
through rock at an average depth of 125 feet. A
masonry conduit takes the water from the Bronx
to the Harlem River. Here an inverted siphon
carries the water 300 feet below the river and
into large pipes and on to the Central Park
Reservoir.
As each aqueduct was built, breaking world
engineering records, the pay eked upwards even
as workers continued to die by the hundreds.
The 92-mile Catskill Aqueduct claimed the highest toll – 283 lives. Construction started in 1907
and lasted 10 years. About midway though, after
a violent strike, the workers base wage was
Deep under New York City, “sandhogs” work on Tunnel No 3. (Source: N.Y.D.E.P.)
raised to $2 a day.
This aqueduct, the world’s longest until its
covering it with fill. Through a total of 14 miles the aqueDelaware counterpart was built, was blasted through mounduct was blasted under mountains. Pressure tunnels were
tains, 1,100 feet under the Hudson River and along the
used for 17 miles under valleys and deep rivers. These
coastal plain. The diverse terrain demanded a variety of
involve working in caissons – open-ended concrete chammethods. For 55 miles, the engineers used the simplest and
bers that are maintained at a high enough pressure to keep
cheapest way of digging a trench, building a conduit and
underground water from gushing in as the
workers blast the rock and remove the rubble.
As with deep-sea divers, sandhogs in
pressure tunnels must be brought to the surface gradually to avoid developing the bends.
Also called “caisson disease” this painful and
potentially fatal condition is caused by the
formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream.
The pressure method was used to tunnel
1,114 feet below the Hudson to create an
inverted siphon. On the west side of the
Hudson, the tunnel drops from an elevation
of 418 feet above sea, crosses under the river
at a slight downward gradient, then at the east
side it rises in two steps to an elevation of
394 feet above sea level. With the help of
gravity and atmospheric pressure the water
flows down the west side, along the bottom
The multi-million dollar tunnel boring machine being used to dig City Tunnel No. 3.
tunnel and up the east side. From here the
(Source: N.Y.D.E.P.)
67
water flows through the tunnel by gravity to the
Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County at the
southwestern tip of Connecticut.
When the Delaware Aqueduct was finished in
1945 its 84 miles made it the world’s longest continuous tunnel. (Its older sister, the Catskill Aqueduct
is longer at 92 miles but 55 miles of it are a covered
trench.) At least 58 workers were killed during construction of the Delaware tunnel, which runs from
the Rondout Reservoir to the Kensico. Water from
the Rondout and Neversink didn’t begin to flow
through the aqueduct until 1954 because construction were delayed by World War II. Three more tunnels, six miles, 25 miles and 44 miles long, connect
the Neversink, Pepacton and Cannonsville to the
Rondout.
The Delaware and Catskill aqueducts, which
provide 90 percent of the system’s water, meet at the
Kensico. Under normal conditions the water from
these tunnels mixes in the Kensico before it flows to
the Hillview Reservoir where it is distributed to the
city tunnels. But the aqueducts can be diverted
around the Kensico if necessary.
New York City Mayor Rudolph Guilianni honors “sandhogs” who are working on
Three tunnels, including the still incomplete No.
Tunnel No. 3. (Source: N.Y.C.D.E.P.)
3, run deep under the city to feed a network of water
mains ranging in size from 6 to 84 inches in diameter. The network has about 6,000 miles of pipe, 87 mainline
valves and 98,000 fire hydrants. Pressure ranges from 35 to 60
pounds per square inch, which is enough to supply up to the
sixth floor of buildings. Some 95 percent of the water flows to
the city by gravity. (National Research Council Report.)
68
14
New Challenges
Hunter Mountain, scalped for 230 acres of ski trails.
monitoring plan for New York. The decision to add it at 28 sites
came after the New York regional division of the E.P.A.
expressed concern about the wastewater systems of the winter
recreation resorts in the Catskills. Winter recreation – particularly skiing – is booming, and that increases the volume of
wastewater from septic systems and treatment plants at a time
when the streams’ natural biological filtering systems are at
their lowest level of efficiency.
F
ebruary 10, 2001. Snow flurries pushed by a northwesterly swept across the valley. Trout fishing season was
still months away, yet two human figures in waders battled the midstream current of Schoharie Creek in the northern
Catskills on this bitterly cold morning. Instead of trout rods,
they clutched small bottles they used to collect samples of the
water. They shuffled slowly through the water, carefully feeling
with their feet for rocks and holes. A fall in that icy water and
weather would not be funny.
It was one of those crazy late-winter days in the Catskills.
Dawn had been sunny and balmy with the thermometer reading
40°F. By midmorning it was gray, as mist and snow flurries
blurred the mountains – and the temperature had dropped to
freezing. By midafternoon the ambient temperature had plunged
to 18°F with a howling gale and wind-chill factor well down
the minus scale.
W INTER
H UNTER M OUNTAIN
A few miles upstream from where the Stroud crew was
sampling, cars were streaming across a wide bridge over the
Schoharie into a series of vast parking lots that had been bulldozed into the northern foot of the Catskills’ second highest
mountain.
This is Hunter Mountain Ski Bowl, the biggest ski resort in
the Catskills’ region. The commercial organization that owns
the resort shaved the mountainsides to make way for 15 trails.
Its 230 skiable acres are served by 11 lifts, which can carry
15,500 skiers an hour. The resort is advertised as the
“Snowmaking Capital of the World,” guaranteeing skiing
through the winter, whether or not nature provides snow.
On that day in February the place was crowded and busy. It
was midweek, yet the parking lots were almost full. Muddy, oilslicked puddles trickled off the parking lots, heading downhill
SAMPLING
This is the kind of variable weather the Stroud Center’s
winter organic chemistry section’s sampling crew, Arlene Casas
and Jessica Mathisen, faced in January and February of 2001.
They were doing winter “base-flow” sampling, which means
taking samples of the water at the streams’ regular flow level –
as opposed to higher-level flows caused by snowmelt and
storms. Winter sampling was not part of the Center’s original
69
Over the next 132 years the city built one
of the most impressive public water systems in the world. In doing so it acquired
a vast and sometimes unruly empire far
beyond its municipal boundaries. Now, as
the city moves into a new century, it
faces new problems that could very well
prove more expensive, extensive and
frustrating than the land acquisition and
building of its entire system of reservoirs
and aqueducts.
Until this summer, the most immediate challenge was the looming 2002
deadline for proving to the federal government that the city can maintain the
quality of the west-of-Hudson watersheds, which provide 90 percent of the
water. Failure to do so would cost the city
Amid swirling snow flurries and a frigid windchill, Stroud Center staffers,
a $6 billion filtration plant plus millions
Arlene Casas and Jessica Mathisen sample a tributary of the Schoharie Creek.
of dollars in fines for violating federal
orders.
to the Schoharie. Inside the main building skiers were warming
But the city got a break when the E.P.A. announced a comup with fresh cups of coffee and chocolate milk, and they were
promise on July 23, 2001 that let it off the hook – at least for
using the bathrooms. Outside, the lower ski area was bustling
the time being. Under this deal the E.P.A. would not force the
with lines of people waiting to be scooped up by the relentless
city to build the filtration plant for the western reservoirs.
lifts. The training slopes were crowded with snowplowing
Among the conditions attached to the offer were that the city
beginners, even toddlers were falling, laughing and crying.
must continue to improve its water in ways other than filtration,
Higher up the mountain, machines spewed new snow onto the
look into the much cheaper alternative of ultra-violet treatment
trails.
and prepare a detailed plan for a filtration plant just in case one
In the valley below, the icy Schoharie Creek meandered
is needed.
along the foot of the mountain, picking up the runoff from the
The E.P.A. decision gave the city some much-needed
parking lots and whatever else perked through the soil from
breathing room at a time when it was having major problems
septic systems.
even trying to find a place to build the much smaller filtration
The Stroud Center’s Laurel Standley and her organic chemplant for the Croton water system east of the Hudson. The city
istry assistants were not surprised to find high levels of caffeine
is finding that it no longer has the political clout to build strucin the Schoharie.
tures wherever and whenever it chooses – even on its own
Standley and her assistants look for “tracers” in their water
parkland within the city limits.
sampling, which indicate sources of pollution in streams. For
On July 21, 1999, ten days short of a federal deadline to
instance, significant levels of caffeine and laundry detergent
choose a site, New York City Council voted 32 to 10 to build a
fragrances may point to failures of wastewater treatment plants
filtration plant for the Croton system in the Bronx at a cost of
and septic systems. Petroleum and combustion byproducts are
about $1 billion.
indicators of pollution from stormwater runoff from parking
“We have to do it,” a city councilor said at the time,
lots and other impervious surfaces.
according to a report in “The New York Times” of July 22,
1999. “This site is the one with the least impact on the fewest
N EW KINDS OF PROBLEMS
amount of people.”
In 1835, New York City overcame centuries of public
The plan was elaborate. The city proposed to build a filtraresistance, corruption and political dithering to commit its enertion plant on 23 acres under the Mosholu Golf Course in Van
gy and resources to finding a reliable supply of clean water.
Cortlandt Park, which at 1,146 acres is larger than Central Park.
70
In an attempt to appease the community for the disruption,
the city planned to upgrade the golf course from nine holes to
18 and improve the recreational area and playground.
Nevertheless, the Bronx representatives on the city council
all voted against the plan, and most of the community remained
adamantly opposed to the filtration plan in their backyard, even
though it would be buried and out of sight. The city had already
shelved its first plan to build the plant at the Jerome Park reservoir, also in the Bronx. In the face of overwhelming local opposition and looming lawsuits, the city went ahead with the
Mosholu Golf Course plan, with construction set to begin in the
summer of 2001.
But on February 9, 2001, New York State’s highest court
blocked the plan, leaving the city with little option but to find
somewhere else to build the plant.
As a result of the court’s action, the city is now liable for
heavy state and federal fines retroactive to July 1999. State officials estimated that the city owed $5 million in retroactive fines
plus $5,000 a day until the city finds a site and begins construction. (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani thought that figure was in fact
$25,000 per day, reported the “Times.”)
With little chance of success on appeal, the city must now
look elsewhere, an option it is finding more and more difficult.
Gone are the days when the city could march into an area and
expropriate property at will.
The other option is for the city to appeal to the E.P.A. and
the state Department of Environmental Conservation to reconsider the filtration order.
The Croton system is still within the federal health stan-
dards for public water. The E.P.A. order to filter was made in
the early 1990s on the grounds that the Croton would not meet
the standards in years to come because of increasing urbanization around the streams and reservoirs. Environmental and conservation organizations in the New York region are pressing the
city to take the non-filtration road. They want the city to use
some of the money that would have gone to a filtration plant to
buy up more land around the Croton reservoirs and streams and
to implement tighter watershed management to ensure that the
water supply maintains health standards.
The strategy is similar to the one the city is already implementing in the Catskills and Delaware watersheds in an attempt
to avoid the $6 billion expense of building a filtration plant.
But even in the west, filtration avoidance is by no means a
foregone conclusion. Growth in the Catskills and Delaware
County is a hot political potato whose outcome could make
things even more difficult for the city to keep the watersheds
clean.
One development the city – and just about everyone else in
the Hudson watershed – is watching closely is colorful entrepreneur Dean Gitter’s huge resort plan proposed for inside
Catskills Park.
From a commercial viewpoint, its location is ideal. It is
accessible – off the Catskills’ main road, Route 28 – yet it gives
the impression of being on a remote mountain range; and it’s
right next to the popular state-owned and run Belleayre
Mountain Ski Center.
What worries opponents is the scale of the venture, which
would make it by far the biggest development in the park. In
Thousands of cars park each day at the Hunter Mountain Ski Bowl
on a vast lot on the bank of the Schoharie Creek.
71
size and looks the proposed Belleayre (pronounced Bell-Air)
Resort would be more like the glitzy resorts just south of the
park that were once so popular.
Gitter and his partners propose a $300-million complex of
two 18-hole golf courses, two hotels, lodges and hundreds of
time-share houses on a 500-acre section of a 2,000-acre tract
owned by the developers. Gitter, who sports a cowboy hat and
ponytail, has a sketchy track record with developments. His
successes so far include the highly visible Catskill Corners, a
gaudy but relatively small tourist center off Route 28 in the
middle of the park. Across the road is the $7-million Emerson
Inn, Gitter’s biggest venture to date. The largest venture he has
been involved in was a $500 million theme park and trade center outside Baltimore that collapsed due mostly to local opposition, according to a report in “The New York Times” of May
16, 2001.
Of special concern to the city’s watershed management
efforts is the proposed resort’s location on a ridge that separates
the Delaware and Hudson watersheds. Creeks and stormwater
flow off the ridge into the streams that feed the Ashokan and
Pepacton, which together provide about half the city’s water.
Other opponents include the residents of the
nearby hamlet of Pine Hill, who are outraged by
the fact that Mr. Gitter bought their town’s water
system for his development. The hamlet was on
the verge of buying the system itself when Gitter
stepped in, presumably with a better offer. To an
outsider it’s puzzling that the area that supplies
water to one of the largest cities in the world
would need to buy water. But apparently water is
a problem. Gitter was reportedly advised by his
attorneys that availability of water could be critical to state approval of his development.
Supporters of the resort – and there are also
plenty of them, going by letters to the editor in
the local newspapers – feel it will bring muchneeded investment and jobs to the economically
depressed area. Gitter told the “Times” the resort
would create 350 full-time jobs, contribute $80
million a year to the local economy and $100
million to the tax base.
Although the plan was an issue in New York
City’s last mayor’s race, officially the city
administration appears to be holding its tongue.
It’s a slippery slope. Under the Memorandum of
Agreement the city is committed to help promote
local economic development; at the same time it
must preserve the land around the streams and reservoirs that
provide its water.
As of June 2001, Gitter’s plan was still under review by
New York State’s environmental agency.
W ILDERNESS
VS . MANAGED USE
New York City’s efforts to protect the watersheds by buying up more land faces a more subtle form of opposition, as
depicted in this item in a local weekly newspaper:
A front page picture in the “Ulster County Townsman” of
February, 15, 2001, showed a sign tacked on a birch tree which
warned, “RESTRICTED AREA. NO TRESPASSING. DO
NOT ENTER FOR ANY PURPOSE.” Underneath was the seal
of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The caption read:
BAD SIGN – These new signs are popping up throughout
the upstate watershed as New York City continues to buy up
property. To avoid having to filter the water, NYC agreed to
buy up environmentally sensitive land in the watershed. Once it
is posted, like this parcel on Wittenberg Road, it is gone forever.
72
The caption does represent the view of many residents,
even though the D.E.P. allows fishing, hiking and hunting on
much of its land, streams and reservoirs. (This changed after
Sept. 11. See final chapter.)
Such conflicts over the use of preserved land have been
simmering in New York - and across the nation - since the late
1800s when the conservation movement was born. At that time
America’s wilderness and nature’s vulnerability to the relentless
destruction of the upstate mountain forests were becoming
important issues. Among the messengers were nature writers
John Burroughs and George Perkins Marsh,the artists of the
Hudson River School, as well as a dashing young outdoorsman
who would become the nation’s 26th president.
The history of the conflict is a theme of a summer 2001
series of articles in “The New York Times” on the relationship
between the Hudson River School and changing attitudes
towards nature. In the second of 10 articles, writer Kirk
Johnson wraps his story around a painting, “Hunter Mountain,
Twilight,” and two men, the naturalist and writer John Muir and
Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service and
later governor of Pennsylvania. The painting, an 1866 canvas
by Sanford Robinson Gifford, depicts a forlorn landscape of
tree stumps set against the grandeur of Hunter Mountain.
Johnson portrays the painting as symbol of the chasm that
was forming between those who wanted forests conserved for
the full use of the public and purists who believed wilderness
areas should be left – or returned to – as close to their wild
state as possible.
Gifford Pinchot’s father named his son after the artist,
whom he admired and befriended. Though the Pinchot family
made its fortune in lumbering, both father and son were ardent
conservationists of the emerging school that believed forests
were renewable resources that should be preserved, cultivated
and managed to allow commercial lumbering and other human
uses such as recreation.
On the other side of the issue that divides the nation to this
day was John Muir. The Scottish-born Muir, who lived most of
his life in the American West and part of it in the Yosemite
Valley, helped launch the modern environmental movement
with his anguished crusade to save the western wilderness.
By the 1880s the beaver was long gone and the passenger
pigeon and bison were heading the same way. Aroused by both
the Muir and Pinchot conservation factions – and at the turn of
the century by outdoors-loving President Theodore Roosevelt public opinion began to change. By 1910, some 250,000 square
miles of forest had been preserved, mostly in the West. Most of
the forested land was saved under the Pinchot philosophy that
its preservation guaranteed long-term supplies of lumber and
minerals for the nation.
As far as Hunter Mountain is concerned, the Pinchot view
prevailed. Today the northernmost peak of the Catskills’ second
highest mountain at 4,050 feet high looks like it’s been scalped.
While the Hunter Mountains of the Catskills are a vast
improvement over the wholesale devastation of the mountain
forests of the 19th century, they do represent the conflict that
faces the Catskills: economic growth for 80,000 residents vs.
clean and cheap water for nine million residents of a distant
city and it’s northern suburban neighbors.
That is what brought the different interests groups to the
conference table to hammer out the Memorandum of
Agreement. But it is a fragile arrangement that is already showing signs of strain.
73
15
Zooming In
The results showed a strong relationship between the diversity of macroinvertebrates in the water and the extent of certain
human impacts on the watershed.
There were, however, a few eyebrow-raisers, such as finding that Trout Creek, a stream that runs through Delaware
County farmland directly into the Cannonsville Reservoir, has
one of the highest macroinvertebrate water-quality scores even
though it drains a Superfund site.
One stream in the higher-scoring watersheds west of the
Hudson, the Rondout Creek, had a much lower quality score
than expected, probably because it had been scoured by a powerful storm the week before sampling.
The data also show a strong relationship between the
amount of dissolved organic carbon in the streams and the per-
T
he Stroud Center’s mission for the New York project,
said Bern Sweeney, is to study the streams and reservoirs thoroughly and comprehensively, analyze the data,
and report to the appropriate state and federal agencies “as
objectively as possible.”
In its 35 years the Stroud Center has monitored watersheds
throughout North America and Costa Rica. But the New York
project is the first to involve all the Center’s research sections –
Biogeochemistry, Microbiology, Entomology, Ecosystem
Processes and Organic Chemistry.
No earth-shattering surprises came out of the first year’s
results, said Sweeney and project coordinator Charles Dow.
“Across all 60 sites there is a basic consistency in what
we’re seeing in the chemistry and bug data,” said Mr. Dow.
75
centage of wetlands in their drainage areas. Dissolved organic
carbon is an important indicator of how well the stream
ecosystems are processing organic material.
Sweeney stressed that there are so many variables attached
to each sampling sit that a clear picture will not emerge until
the Center has collected several years of sampling data.
The Stroud Center’s 262-page first-year report cautions
against a “rush to judgement concerning the relative condition
of any given site based on the one-time findings presented
here.”
Although the results “are interesting,” notes the report, a
single year’s sampling data is not enough to “draw firm conclusions regarding the environmental health of the study sites,
broad patterns of water quality, or the sources of contamination.”
T HE
he drives home his multilateral approach to cleaning up pollution of streams and rivers.
As the head of perhaps the world’s leading research center
on stream and river ecosystems, Sweeney is often asked which
of these methods he recommends:
n best management practices on the hillsides
n establishing natural riparian buffers to intercept the pollution before it gets to the streams
n riparian buffers that create better environments – such as
shade and leaf litter – for the streams.
“To ask which of those three is the most important is like
asking which of the legs on a three-legged stool is the most
important,” said Sweeney. The first two methods represent the
traditional approach to keeping pollution out of the streams. It’s
the third point that Sweeney has trouble getting across, even to
fellow scientists in his field. At the Soil and Water Conservation
Society’s “National Conservation Buffers Workshop” in
Nebraska in the summer of 2001, he was the only delegate who
was pushing the third method. It took him most of the two-day
workshop to convince his peers of the importance of the forested buffer in creating a stream that can clean up the pollutants.
“ I told them we have data showing that in a forested
stream you have two, three, four times more nitrogen processing going on than in a meadow stream - this is an example.”
The data, he said, is showing that the streamside forest creates
an environment that helps the stream use up nitrogen and other
nutrients that cause problems in reservoirs.
THREE - LEGGED STOOL
The report is cautious, documenting and interpreting the
Center’s sampling results with a plethora of highly technical
charts and tables.
The Stroud Center’s work over the years has shown that
there is more to monitoring than grabbing a sample of water
and analyzing it for compliance; and that the solution to nonpoint pollution is more complex than managing the land
sources.
Sweeney uses the analogy of the three-legged stool when
With the afternoon sun slanting through the the blinds,
Karen Jansson demonstrates the labs gas chromatography mass spectrometer.
76
The “bug crew” at work in the macroinvertebrate lab at the Stroud Center.
“There’s a lot of interest and enthusiasm in re-creating
streamside forests to try to help with nonpoint pollution,
but the mentality really is to look at those streamside forest
buffers as being filters for intercepting contaminants that
are moving off the landscape. There hasn’t been any
thought given to the fact that the streamside forest buffer
does wonderful things for the stream itself, which puts the
stream in a better position to process those materials that
actually do get into it.
I think the wake-up call is that these forest buffers are
sort of a first line of defense. . . . But they don’t keep
everything from getting in. Perhaps their greatest value is
that they put the stream – the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the stream – into a state where it
can process these things for us, do work for us. That’s
what’s been missing [in the scientific research].”
Sweeney said he hopes the results get the New York
agencies thinking about how rivers actually function. For
instance, the Kisco River spiraling experiment results
showed that the stream was not using up the nitrogen.
“I said to one of the officials up there, ‘Wouldn’t it be
interesting if some of your rivers are actually just direct
conduits, conveying nutrients directly into the reservoirs.
The river is so disturbed that it functionally can’t help in
any way to prevent the nutrients from entering the reservoirs.’
“I don’t think they ever thought about that. I think they
never thought about the health of the river being a critical
component of their treatment system.”
Traditionally New York’s approach has been to locate
the source of the pollution, to buy the land and to institute
management practices that keep contaminants from getting
into the streams. If they can’t keep the contaminants out,
then they try to treat or filter them out.
“What they were missing was that in-between scenario: what can the streams and rivers actually do for us in
terms of filtration and treatment. And that’s where I think
our information may be very revealing.”
Sweeney hopes the Center’s results will show New
York that if a stream or river is allowed to recover it will
be in a better position to remove pollutants such as pesticides and nutrients. “That’s where I think we’re doing
some pioneering work.”
He said you can’t gauge a stream’s health – its ability
77
to remove pollutants naturally – simply by grabbing samples for
quick analysis. It can only be done by detailed biological and
chemical studies, such as the Stroud Center is doing in New
York.
“ I think what we’re fighting up in New York is just the
mindset. It’s just a matter of education. I don’t think it’s a matter of hardheadedness or stupidity, it’s just a matter of not thinking about it – actually not having it put to them in a way that
they can relate to.”
But he feels that the E.P.A. and the state D.E.C. are beginning to come around to the Center’s ideas.
“I do, I really do. I really think they’re coming around in a
big way,” Sweeney said, adding that he feels the city D.E.P. will
also “come around when they see what’s going on.”
There are other areas, too, where Stroud’s research is leading the way. At the North American Benthological Society’s
annual conference in June for example, a major point that
emerged was that water scientists should use molecular tracers
to determine the origins of contaminants. One of the tracers recommended was, caffeine – a tracer the Stroud Center has been
using for several years.
Sweeney said he astonished delegates when he told them “.
. . not only are we measuring caffeine, we’re measuring fragrances, we’re measuring all these different forms of cholesterol.”
Speakers at the meeting were also urging scientists to do
more research on tracers, to use them in biomonitoring, and to
do more functional biomonitoring measurements on streams,
such as stream metabolism and nutrient spiraling – all of which
the Stroud Center has been doing for years.
Yet, in New York the agencies are asking why the Center is
doing such things as the spiraling experiments.
“This is what standard practice should be,” a frustrated
Sweeney has been telling agency officials.
“ I feel good about what we’re doing in New York. I’m
hoping they’ll be patient enough that they’ll wait for the threeyear data set. I think you need three years to really pigeonhole a
river one way or the other.”
NO
lem. I think with this recent E.P.A. decision, that maybe some
of that is beginning to filter through,” he said.
Referring to the E.P.A. deal that would allow the city to
avoid building the $6-billion filtration plant for the west-ofHudson water system.
“I think if we get a chance to fully execute the first three
years of this project, and analyze the three-year data set, that the
value we’ll be able to convey to them will be so great that
there’ll be no question in my mind – it’s just a matter of getting
there,” Sweeney said. “And we are getting there.”
S EPTEMBER 11
After the World Trade Center attack the city moved quickly
to secure its critical water supplies by closing off public access
to all its reservoirs and surrounding lands. No fishing is now
permitted in the reservoirs. And hunting and hiking are no
longer allowed in the thousands of acres of watershed land the
city controls in the Catskills and Croton.
The Stroud Center field work, too, was stopped briefly. But
after a few weeks of uncertainly, the crews were permitted back
into the streams to finish the summer sampling. Fortunately, all
reservoir work had been completed before September 11, except
for a planned repeat sampling of the Kensico, which the Center
has now decided to forgo.
As the sampling season came to a close, it was still unclear
how the new security and budgetary concerns would affect the
future of the project.
Parts of the watershed now look like military zones, as helicopters, police boats and armed guards patrol the skies, roads
and reservoirs. New York, like most other large cities in North
America, is now reassessing the safety of its drinking water
supplies.
Experts quoted by “The New York Times,” however, say
the threat to public water is remote. “In fact, experts on germ
warfare say, to cause widespread problems by contaminating a
public water supply verges on the impossible,” reported the
“Times” (September 26, 2001).
The experts agreed that poisoning the voluminous rivers
and reservoirs of public water supplies would take truckloads of
chemicals or biological agents that would be difficult to produce
and relatively easy to spot.
In the unlikely event of contamination, most public supply
systems can close off the affected reservoir and rely on the others.
The biggest threat is a disruption of the supply, such as sabotaging a main aqueduct. But this would also be difficult to do
in the New York City as the main aqueducts run deep under-
DOUBTS
Asked if he’d had any doubts about the Center’s work in
New York, Sweeney said, “No, never. But I kind of wondered
whether they were ever going to see the other side. They were
so engrossed in doing the kind of monitoring they’ve always
been doing – that standard approach and thinking about sampling and thinking about the system in a way that was just stifling their ability to see possible solutions to their overall prob-
78
ground. The experts felt that the most effective contamination
could be done by patching into the pipes after the supply lines
have left the filtration and distribution systems. In that the city’s
way neighborhoods could be targeted.
But the experts did concede that they are looking at everything differently now, in light of what was once thought to be
equally unthinkable – the destruction of the World Trade
Centers.
Fall on the Schoharie Creek, Catskill Mountains, N.Y.
79
Appendix: The Reservoirs
East of Hudson
Croton System
1837-1911
375-sq.mile watershed
Provides 10 percent of city demand (250 million gallons a day)
Reservoirs
Built
Acres
Capacity (gals)
Old Croton
New Croton
Boyd’s Corners
1,962
300
19 billion
1.7 billion
404
521
381
600
(1.5sq mi)
682
931
899
126
3 billion
3.9 billion
4.4 billion
6.7 billion
8 billion
7.2 billion
4.9 billion
10.3 billion
14.2 billion
900 million
168
122
101
165 million
380 million
568 million
Middle Branch
East Branch
Bog Brook
Amawalk
West Branch
Titicus
Muscoot
Cross River
Croton Falls
Croton Falls Div
1837-42
1892-1905
1866-1873
(1888-1893)
1874-1878
1888-1893
1889-1893
1889-1997
1890-96
1890-96
1901-1905
1905-1908
1906-1911
1906-1911
Controlled Lakes
Lake Gleneida
Lake Gilead
Kirk Lake
West of Hudson
Catskill System
1907-1927
571-sq. mile watershed
Provides 40 percent of city demand (650 million gallons a day)
Reservoirs
Built
Acres
Capacity (gals)
Ashokan
Schoharie
1907-1915
1919-1927
12.8 sm
1.8 sm
123 billion
17.6 billion
Delaware System
1937-1965
Provides 50 percent of city demand (890 million gallons a day)
Reservoirs
Built
Acres
Rondout *
1937-1943
2,032
1946-1954
Neversink
1941-1943
1,480
1946-1953
Pepacton
1947-1954
5,178
Cannonsville
1955-1967
4,568
140.2 billion
95.7 billion
Storage & Balancing reservoirs
Kensico
Hillview
1909-1915
1909-1915
2,081
90
30.6 billion
900 million
Distributing Reservoirs
Central Park
Jerome Park
1857-1862
1894-1905
96
94
1 billion
0.8 billion
Capacity (gals)
49.6 billion
34.9 billion
Source: Diane Galusha’s Liquid Assets. A History of New York City’s Water System.
Although the Rondout falls under the Delaware System, it is actually in the Hudson River watershed.
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References
Ashokan Reservoir, The. A video film made and distributed by the
library of West Hurley, one of the villages that were moved to make
way for the reservoir.
Schneiderman, Jill S, Editor. The Earth Arounc Us. Maintaining a
Livable Planet. W.H. Freeman and Company. 455 pages. Series of
essays by prominent earth-science writers.
Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix. A Biogaphy of Water. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, New York. 417 pages.
Slaughter, Thomas P. The Natures of John and Willian Bartram.
Alfred A. Knopf. 1996. 304 pages. References to the famous naturalist father and son team’s trip to the Catskills.
Boyle, Robert H. The Hudson River. A Natural and Unnatural
History. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. 1969. The writer
founded the Hudson Riverkeeper.
Steuding, Bob. The Last of the Handmade Dams. The Story of the
Ashokan Reservoir. Purple Mountain Press. 127 pages.
Burroughs, John. Works of John Burroughs. Sixteen volumes.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Frequent references throughout to
the Catskills region, in particular to the writer’s native Delaware
County, New York.
Stroud Water Research Center. Water Quality Monitoring in the
Source Areas for New York City: An Integrative Watershed
Approach. Final draft report on the Stroud Water Research Center’s
first yer of monitoring. May 15, 2001.
Burroughs, John. Pepacton. Vol. V of the Works of John Burroughs.
N E W S PA P E R S
Burrows, Edwin G. & Wallace, Mike.Gotham. A History of New
York City to 1898. Oxford University Press. 1999. 1,383 pages. (Of
particular note, Chapter 35, “Filth, Fever, Water, Fire.”)
The New York Times. Daily. New York City. Current news and
archives available at newsstands and at www.nytimes.com
Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. The Catskills. A
Sense of Place. Arkville, N.Y. 167 pages. Available as a PDF file at
www.catskillcentr.org.
Catskill Mountain News. Weekly newspaper. Arkville, N.Y. 12406.
Catskill Center News. A publication of the Catskill Center for
Conservation and Development. Volume 29 Number 1.
Spring/Summer 2000.
Ulster County Townsman. Weekly newspaper. 18 Rock City Road,
Woodstock, N.Y. 12498.
Daily Freeman. Daily newspaper. Kingston, N.Y.
Woodstock Times. Weekly newspaper. 322 Wall Street, Kingston,
N.Y. 12401.
Evers, Alf. The Catskills. From Wilderness to Woodstock. Doubleday
& Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 821 pages.
Woodstock Journal. Biweekly newspaper. Box 805, Woodstock, N.Y.
12498.
Galusha, Diane. Liquid Assets. A History of New York City’s Water
System. Purple Mountain Press. 1999. 304 pages.
M AG A Z I N E S
Hall, Edward H. Water for New York City. Excerpted and edited by
Richard Frisbie from the The Catskill Aqueduct, which was printed in
1917. Hope Farm Press in 1993.
Irving, Washington. Rip Van Winkle. A Posthumous Writing of
Diedrich Knickerbocker.
The New Yorker. Weekly. New York City. Available at newsstands and
at www.newyorker.com
Talk. Monthly magazine owned by Miramax. “RFK Jr.’s River of
Trouble,” October 2000. www.talkmagazine.com
Websites & Internet-accessible publications
Koeppel, Gerard T. Water for Gotham. A History. Princeton
University Press. Copyright 2000. 355 pages.
McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, New York. 696 pages. A North American geology primer.
The Catskills. A Sense of Place. A downloadable series of educational
guides for teachers compiled by the Catskill Center for Conservation
and Development, Arkville, N.Y.
Outwater, Alice. Water. A Natural History. 1996. BasicBooks. 212
pages.
Jerome Park Conservancy: History and status of Croton system.
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/preservationreport/summary.html
Nation Research Council. Watershed Management for Potable Water
Supply: Assessing New York City’s Approach. A 427-page report.
National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. The Stroud Center has a
typed advance copy. It is also available online and in book form.
Scientific American archives April 15, 1905
http://www.yorktownhistory.org/photoarchive/crotondam/index.htm
Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition. A non profit membership
organization formed in 1997 to protect the waters of the still unfiltered Croton System through regional action, in order to avoid filtration.
http://www.newyorkwater.org/aboutus.html
Riverkeeper. Official publication of Riverkeeper Inc., an environmental advocacy organization founded in 1983 by the Hudson
Fishermen’s Association.
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