Gas drilling awareness spreading

NYC councilman calls for ban

By FRITZ MAYER

NEW YORK CITY, NY — Add another New York City-based politician that has become aware of the possible gas drilling coming to the Catskills. New York City Councilman James Gennaro held a press conference on August 8 to call on Governor David Paterson to place a ban on gas drilling in the Upper Delaware watershed, which provides the city with much of its drinking water.

According to an account of the press conference in The New York Times, Gennaro, a geologist and chairman of the council’s Environmental Protection Committee, said, “This is an activity that is completely and utterly inconsistent with a drinking water supply. This would destroy the New York City watershed, and for what? For short-term gains on natural gas?”

One of the big concerns about drilling in the watershed is the possibility that with the use of chemicals in the fracking process, the water supply could become contaminated, which could lead to an expensive situation. As things exist now, the city is able to avoid installing a costly filtration system for its water supply because it is able to control the amount of pollution that enters it. Should the water supply become contaminated, the city might be compelled to spend $10 billion to build a filtering system for its sprawling network of reservoirs.

Gennaro was joined in his press conference by a representative of Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to, among other things, protecting the city’s water.

In 1997, New York State, Riverkeeper and numerous other parties signed the New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), which recognized that clean drinking water is vital to the health, social and economic wellbeing of all New Yorkers and must be protected.

James Simpson, an attorney with Riverkeeper, said, “The state must honor its commitment in the MOA to protect this critical resource, which supplies half the state’s population with unfiltered drinking water on a daily basis. It is our duty to safeguard this water supply for all current and future generations.”

The press conference came just two days after the non-profit news organization made public a letter from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to officials in Albany regarding gas drilling. In the letter, Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the DEP, asked the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to ban drilling in a one-mile buffer zone surrounding the city’s six reservoirs in the Catskills.

The Delaware River watershed provides drinking water for 17 million people.