Protecting the Delaware River

The oil spill in the Gulf has people rethinking natural gas drilling and the harm it could do to the Delaware River, a drinking water source for over 17 million people. It’s good that people are rethinking the risk-reward factors, because the Delaware River needs all the help it can get.

There’s something else people should rethink: renewing the horrible operating plan that controls the water flow to the Delaware River.

There are two very serious problems that riverside communities, fishermen and some ecologists have with the management of the Delaware River. Sadly, it comes down to this:

The Delaware River Basin Commission’s current operating plan, the Flexible Flow Management Plan (FFMP) is not only unsafe to people, but also destroys cold water aquatic life in the Upper Delaware. This plan has the unique distinction of creating thermal pollution and reducing the river flow to a fraction of what it needs to be in the upper main stem. At the same time, the reservoirs that feed the river, located in its headwaters, are brim full with water, which their owner, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) admits to not being able to use. Even so, NYC DEP has been unwilling to let the water out to sustain a healthy cold water ecosystem.

These full reservoirs cause man-made flooding when they spill during high rainfall events, like hurricanes and tropical storms. How can they not spill when it rains, if the reservoirs are kept full all the time? When it rains hard, they can spill over 100 billion gallons, as they did in June 2006.

It gets even better: if a drought hits, this cockamamie plan has built in drastic cuts in water withdrawals for everyone except—you guessed it—NYC. New Yorkers won’t even know there is a drought because NYC’s water diversion “cutback” is above their daily consumption. They won’t feel a thing. The rest of us? It’ll be ugly.

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has had to come up with constant fixes for their plan every season. The latest “Summertime Adjustment” and “Tunnel Closure Release Plan” are re-hashes of last year’s unsuccessful adjustments. Of these two plans, and the latest fix appearing on the DRBC’s website last Friday June 3, “Summer Habitat Improvement Program for Upper Delaware Basin,” Dr. Pete Bousum, trustee of Friends of the Upper Delaware, said this: “Instead of giving them a sip of water, the DRBC is giving the fish a sip and a quarter.”

Everyone but NYC and its supporters plead for the same thing: more water out of the reservoirs. It’s not like NYC needs it; it admits it can’t use what it stores. If NYC were to double the releases called for in this awful plan and recent proposed “fixes,” the fish and the bugs they eat would get to live and propagate, and riverside property owners and communities would breathe a collective sigh of relief as these increased releases would create void space in the reservoirs, providing a measure of safety from manmade flooding.

Even better: instead of using a plan based on politics, scrap the FFMP and develop a plan based on sound science. This would mean following the best practices for operating water impoundments, basing operational protocols on a concept called safe yield, defined as the maximum quantity of water that can be continuously withdrawn from a groundwater basin without adverse effect. NYC reservoirs may not be built for flood control, as NYCDEP and DRBC are fond of saying, but they are built for water supply use. So operate them that way.

(Elaine Reichart is president of Aquatic Conservation Unlimited.)