Consider your kitchen faucet

The other night my neighbor called and told me her kitchen water faucet just “stopped running” while she was preparing dinner. The well’s pump was running but nothing was coming out.

After spending part of the past week considering the onslaught of drought currently threatening the Delaware River Basin, my thinking about strategic issues was quickly refocused to a very specific problem. I suppose we in the media can go on writing about the hundreds of billions of gallons diverted here and the thousands of cubic feet-per-second flowing past there and most people will continue to glaze over at the recitation of statistics.

This reminds me of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who became known, even imitated, for his impassioned, televised enumeration of the “billions upon billions” of stars in the universe. People were more taken with Sagan’s voice and delivery than the point he was trying to make. The fact is that numbers with lots of commas are pretty much meaningless for most of us until they come to home to roost one way or another.

Drought usually comes home to us, economically, in summer when rafters and canoeists stop boating because they have to walk across too many shallow spots or when dead trout appear upstream. Trout become stressed and can die when lower water levels stop supporting the cooler water temperatures needed.

Drought is harder to visualize in fall and winter when the boaters and anglers are largely gone anyway, and there is little incentive to water the lawn or fill the swimming pool.

This time of the year, the falling ground water levels can catch us by surprise. New York State has already issued a “warning” status for ground water reserves in the Catskills; the only such warning to be issued in the state so far. Shallower wells can start to develop inconsistency, but most people won’t know of these scattered problems either.

More evident, at least to foresters and firefighters, are an increased number of brush and forest fires and the difficulty of fighting them when they become “ground fires,” burning beneath the surface in dried forest humus soil. Organically rich forest soil, when dried by drought, has been known to burn or smolder for weeks.

Problems begun in the fall lead to problems in the spring for anglers. When drought reduces stream flows, the normally muddy or wet shoreline area recedes. When summer insects have deposited eggs in the old shoreline, and that area dries up, the eggs do not hatch and a food source for game fish disappears the following spring.

More to the point for valley residents is that low winter flows lead to a freezing condition known as “anchor ice,” where streams literally freeze solid in places. The last time we had a serious encounter with anchor ice was in 1981, when freshet flooding devastated Port Jervis and Matamoras.

Considering the other disasters that have struck since late summer, many of us may be just now considering this drought. And the situation begs the question, “so what?” It’s a drought and there is nothing we can do about it, right?

While it is true that we cannot dispatch the Marines to fight a drought, we can and should be planning for future droughts, so that we can delay or reduce their impact.

“The underlying problem is that current law treats water management in a disconnected and piecemeal fashion…. At all levels, we must manage land and water as inter-dependent resources,” Delaware River Basin Commission Executive Director Carol Collier writes.

While urban and rural areas have different goals to improve the situation, states must plan for joint water and land use in watersheds, Collier believes.

Urban areas must be considering the amount of new paved surfaces that they permit. Paving prevents recharging of ground water and increases what has been traditionally waste runoff.

In all areas, additional detention basins would catch and filter this storm water to put it to practical use. Adaptive reuse of treated sewage plant output with technologies such as spray irrigation could cut water use for lawn and golf course sprinkling, Collier writes.

With new development prompting predictions of unprecedented growth in the Upper Delaware Valley, we will see more homes, more pavement and more calls for additional water.

My neighbor’s recent problem turned out to be a simple plumbing issue and her faucet was soon returned to action. If we reduce the confusing regional water management picture to the image of a single faucet that serves us all, we can see the importance of making certain that the faucet keeps running. The time to plan is now.

David Hulse, News Editor