Because NYC’s water supply is unfiltered, an aggressive program of watershed protection is essential to protect it at its source. The continued quality of the city’s premier drinking water depends on ensuring that the watersheds remain unpolluted and that the water infrastructure is sound. The greatest threats to the NYC watershed are sprawl, aging infrastructure and the presence of pharmaceuticals in our waters.

Sprawl
Sprawl is haphazard development characterized by strip malls outside of existing downtown centers and McMansion subdivisions in formally rural areas. This low density development is dependent on cars and requires new infrastructure and services to be delivered to these dispersed locations. Sprawl creates a preponderance of impervious surfaces − roads, parking lots, building footprints − which devour open space and curtail the landscape’s ability to purify stormwater naturally. Rain collects on impervious surfaces, scours pollutants off roads, and runs off into the nearest surface waters, impacting our drinking water supply.

Aging Infrastructure
The delivery of New York City’s first-rate water depends on a remarkable 6,000-mile network of pipes, shafts and subterranean aqueducts that carries an average 1.5 billion gallons of pristine water each day from 19 upstate reservoirs to over 9 million New Yorkers. The mostly gravity-fed city water delivery system is a remarkable engineering achievement and the single largest man-made financial asset in New York State. Four decades ago, the city’s water supply was regarded as one of America’s proudest engineering accomplishments. But the city’s water infrastructure is now in a state of disrepair that threatens its ability to continue to supply the city with water.

The New Croton Aqueduct stretches 31 miles from the New Croton Reservoir in Westchester County to the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx and the 135th Street Gatehouse in Manhattan. Over 100 years old, its tunnels and shafts are in serious need of rehabilitation.

Constructed between 1937 and 1945, the Delaware Aqueduct draws from four reservoirs – the Cannonsville, Pepacton, Neversink and Rondout – to provide between 50 and 80 percent of the city’s daily water demand. The 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct is the world's longest tunnel. The Rondout-West Branch Tunnel of the aqueduct, located at Wawarsing and Roseton, has been leaking about 35 million gallons of water a day for almost 20 years.

The level of federal funding for clean water infrastructure has dropped from 78 percent in 1978 to 3 percent in 2007. If New York City cannot continue to successfully protect the source of 90% of its water supply—the Catskill/Delaware system—it may be forced to build a water filtration plant estimated to cost $8-12 billion for construction with operating costs of $350 million a year.

Pharmaceuticals
In 2006, the New York State Department of Health reported that organic wastewater contaminants in U.S. streams included 11 sampling sites in the Croton watershed. All 11 sampled streams contained detectable levels of human pharmaceutical compounds. In March 2008, the Associated Press published a series of reports documenting the results of its investigation that detected the presence of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water supplies of 24 of 28 U.S. metropolitan areas – including the New York City supply. In response to the AP reports, the New York City Council held public hearings on this issue on April 3, 2008. Riverkeeper helped prepare testimony that was presented by NYPIRG on behalf of the Clean Drinking Water Coalition (CDWC).

Pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines are excreted or improperly discarded, and enter the waters mostly through residential sewage or farm runoff. Though waters are processed at wastewater treatment plants, pharmaceuticals can often pass through. While detectible levels of pharmaceuticals in the NYC drinking water are quite low, cumulative impacts of consumption over time are not well documented.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees NYC’s water system, has not tested the drinking water for pharmaceuticals, despite these findings in its watershed.

Gas Drilling in the NYC Watershed
According to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the entire West-of-Hudson portion of the New York City Watershed (supplying 90% of drinking water to over half the state’s population) sits on top of part of the Marcellus Shale, a large mineral reserve deposit 6,000 - 8,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface. Oil and gas companies have known about this shale reserve for decades, but the technology to extract natural gas from it has only recently become available. The Marcellus Shale spans across at least five states. Out-of-state oil and gas companies are currently exploring the possibility of drilling into shale reserves below the NYC Watershed. To extract natural gas from the mineral reserve, oil companies plan to use a process called “hydraulic fracturing”

Fracturing involves injecting toxic chemicals, sand, and up to a million gallons of water per well under high pressure directly into shale formations deep below the earth’s surface. This toxic brew, along with any natural gas, is then extracted, or leaked to the surface. Whether any toxic discharges will flow into New York City’s drinking water supply is uncertain. Riverkeeper has called on Governor Paterson to designate the New York City Watershed permanently “off-limits” for natural gas drilling.