Proposed revisions by New York City to the Ashokan Reservoir Interim Release Program (IRP) have been received by Ulster County elected officials about as enthusiastically as a warm glass of turbid water. Ostensibly proposed to enhance benefits to the community, to improve flood attenuation, and to provide better water quality, the revisions would for the first time hand over responsibility for Ashokan Reservoir water releases to Ulster County government.
Pushing back on that offer, county executive Jen Metzger released a letter on February 27 calling for the proposed revisions to be withdrawn entirely. “The proposed IRP revision to shift decision-making to the county over releases is without precedent,” said Metzger. “All other reservoir-release protocols require close communication between the city reservoir release manager and the state reservoir release manager, who have knowledge and expertise to make these decisions.”
A day later, 21 members of the Ulster County Legislature sent a letter concurring that the county was the inappropriate agency to be tasked with maintaining water levels in the reservoir. To make room for snow melt or heavy inundations of rain, the water levels in the 122.9-billion-gallon reservoir can be manipulated through the operation of what New York City terms a release channel built between the reservoir and the lower Esopus Creek (we use the term “lower” here to designate that part of the creek below the so-called waste channel). The system can also manage water levels at the weir which divides the east basin from the west basin
Deciding when conditions are appropriate to discharge water into the creek is an essential component of the original IRP, as well as a bone of contention for the locals who live along the 33-mile creek. Because of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP’s) history of inappropriately muddy water releases, a temporary set of guidelines, the IRP was established as a result of a successful enforcement proceeding brought against the DEP in 2013. This October will mark the passage of a decade wherein the DEP has operated under this temporary framework imposed on it by the commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Unmuddying the waters
Two stout buildings squat on the causeway bridge above the water of the reservoir like windowless stone houses. They signal the location of the chambers and the intake tunnel below, the open mouth of a 96-mile cement throat providing water for the thirsty residents in New York City.
Built at the beginning of the last century to carry Catskills water down to the Kensico Reservoir in Valhalla or to bypass it completely down to Yonkers, the Catskills aqueduct can currently deliver up to 590 million gallons of water per day. These waters approximate 40 percent of New York City’s drinking water each day. The New York City Water Board sets the prices.
From December to March every year, the months in which sunlight and falling rain melt the winter snow, freshets come pouring down out of the Catskills by brook, stream or rivulet to the Schoharie Reservoir. The Schoharie lacks a multi-level intake structure commonly used in most other reservoirs for collecting surface water free from sand and grit, soil and other objectionable floating materials. An 18-mile tunnel leads the gathered waters under mountains and rock to the portal of the Shandaken tunnel, where it joins with waters from the upper Esopus Creek and pours into the vast, 8300-acre surface waters of the Ashokan Reservoir.
The waters arriving into the west basin are turbid, carrying with them all manner of sediment ground up and left as topsoil from the grinding passage of the glaciers, geologists say, some 10,000 years ago.
Running beneath the causeway bridge, where the weir divides the reservoir, the two basins are created, west and east, to calm the waters and let the sediment settle.
The less turbid unfiltered waters from the east basin make for an ideal source of drinking water. Less settled waters from the west basin, having higher turbidity, account for the muddy releases into the lower Esopus — and the resulting history of discontent among those residents living downstream.
As part of the DEC response to the turbid water releases made through the release channel, a working group was formed.
“Any changes to the IRP are meant to be discussed by the Ashokan Release Working Group (ARWG),” said Rebecca Martin, who directs community partnerships for the environmental watchdog group Riverkeeper. “The Ashokan Release Working Group is an entity mandated by the consent order issued along with the IRP, for all the agencies to come together with other partners and stakeholders, municipalities that were impacted, community groups that were formed, and legit NGOs to meet on a regular basis to provide good information.”
Ulster County and Riverkeeper are part of the ARGW.
“We want New York City to have clean water,” says Martin. “And we also want the lower Esopus Creek to no longer be thought of as a waste channel. Right? It’s a water body. You may call something a waste channel, and it allows you to do whatever you want, right? If you called it a tributary, you might think twice about how you treat it.”
Filtration avoidance
Why would the DEP want to hand the reins of the muddy discharge to Ulster County?
“It’s a good question to ask,” says Amanda LaValle, a deputy county executive for Ulster County government. “How and why can you release water? And what makes it polluting, and what makes it okay?”
The agencies responsible for making such determinations are the ones who again and again have allowed the DEP to go on making its spill mitigation releases.
“The premier environmental organization in New York State is the DEC,” says Martin, “which has the responsibility under the Clean Water Act to be engaged on this. And the Department of Health has the responsibility of public health and water supply.”
The Department of Health since 2007 has granted a Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD) to the DEP. The FAD provides a perverse incentive to flush turbid water out of the Catskill system at the source (and into the Esopus) rather than to include its waters in the Catskill aqueduct and violate the FAD later down the tube.
As the DEP itself has noted, New York City would incur many millions of dollars of costs if it were required to stop using the release channel or to reduce the turbidity in the releases. But filtering all the waters from its reservoirs would cost billions annually.
“The [DEP] has a lot of different things that they have to balance and consider when they’re looking at cost-benefit, cost effectiveness,” says LaValle. “So when they did the engineering studies and they were able to evaluate, ‘Oh, we can just change our release protocol and we don’t have to build something in Ashokan Reservoir, we can just choose to release that water.’ It looked like the obvious solution to them.”
As part of the DEC consent order itself which created the IRP, the DEP is authorized to continue releasing the muddy water through long-duration turbid releases.
Other than discharging the muddy west-basin water on the lower Esopus below, an option to deal with turbidity is the addition of alum (aluminum sulfate) into the water supply, as is done at the Kensico Reservoir, where water from the Catskills Aqueduct is treated. The chemical acts to aggregate particulate matter into larger clumps which then sink to the bottom in great enough quantity to become polluted sludge. Dredging the mud, dewatering it, and transporting it for treatment and disposal is the name of the game.
The mud remains in the discharge tunnel, and the residents along the lower Esopus know it well.
Unrequested by the community, and first proposed by the DEC three weeks out from election day, the revisions were offered up while a supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) as well as a stream management plan have yet to be completed.
“There’s a lot of reasons why,” said Martin, “Speculations are clearly spelled out in all of these letters [185 of them] submitted over the comment period that closed yesterday.”
A letter sent from Gary Bassett, chair of the Hudson River Drinking Water Intermunicipal Council, (The Hudson 7) and also an ARWG member, takes the duration of the interim protocol itself to task.
A happy ending?
“The IRP is not an interim solution,” said Bassett. “No other utility would be permitted to revise an interim method after ten years and then continue with a modified interim protocol for another ten to 15 years.”
All eyes are on the DEP for the next move. Representatives of the DEP have not responded for comment at this time, though some off-the-record comments have been very helpful providing background and context.
“There’s a real, real opportunity here for managing for more than turbidity,” said Lavalle, “to really have a broader perspective of both the risks and the benefits.”
If it can play its cards in this high-stakes game well, Ulster County government could yet come out a winner. But it’s likely to require a long and perhaps costly process to reach that happy ending.
“We urge that DEC and DEP expedite completion of the SEQR process and develop better data,” said county executive Metzger, “to enable a well-informed multi-objective management strategy for releases to the lower Esopus. We also make recommendations to improve communication with the Ashokan Release Working Group of stakeholders and elected officials.”
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