Analysis: Flooding in the Delaware Valley

By DAVID HULSE

RIVER VALLEY — The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that defined management and apportionment of the Delaware River’s waters was a settlement of interstate water-dispute litigation dating back to the 1920s, and today it appears to be outdated.

In 1931, before any dams or reservoirs existed on the tail waters, the high court apportioned 440 million gallons per day to the city. The 1954 agreement raised that figure to 800 million gallons daily, of which the city currently draws about 600 to 650 million gallons.

The 1931 decision came before most of the valley’s modern highways and bridges were built, at a time when waste water management meant a pipe into the nearest stream, and when environmental protection for the river valley’s few residents meant keeping a roof over your head.

Booming New York City had no other options for its drinking water in those days. You certainly could not depend on the polluted Hudson.

Little had changed by 1954 and most residents breathed a sigh of relief that they had not shared the fate of Delaware County residents whose homes and hamlets disappeared with the creation of vast reservoirs at the end of the decade.

Today, planners talk about projects and plans in terms of environmental sustainability, whether something naturally supports itself in its environment or is artificially propped.

Today, Sullivan and Pike counties are fast following Orange County in becoming the northwest extension of the metropolitan suburbs, termed “exurbs.”

Today, tens of thousands of additional residents call these counties home and planners struggle with designs for predicted urbanization.

Today, environmental efforts have greatly improved the health of the Hudson Valley. Many communities tap it for their water supplies and the technology exists for New York City to do the same. But the city has no plans to use this technology.

Instead, city officials periodically renew an Environmental Protection Agency exemption that allows one of the largest urban water supply systems in the nation to remain largely unfiltered.

Instead, the city invests millions of dollars in land purchases, which buffer its reservoirs and put valuable agricultural and residential properties off limits to all but hunters and anglers.

New York City’s dams do not and will not protect that growing downstream population from flooding and some residents have come to believe that, like those small hamlets in Delaware County, they too were deemed sacrificial by the U.S. Supreme Court. “It has flooded before and it will flood again,” officials tell them.

While flood-prevention dam projects protect neighboring communities, a complete, interstate “environmental” bureaucracy has grown up around the 1954 decree , designed to protect and nurture the decree at the expense of the Delaware River valley and its residents.

So today’s realities pose the question: Is the daily removal of hundreds of million of gallons of water from one major watershed to supply another, which could well supply itself, environmentally sustainable in 2005? There are many relics of the past that live on in the river valley providing charm and beauty, but many are coming to believe that a 1954 legal decision should not be numbered among them.