A River and its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 18

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18th in a Series

“A river is more than an amenity,”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Although it is enclosed by three rivers – the East, Harlem, and Hudson – Manhattan Island has always suffered from a lack of fresh water. In fact, two of the three are not rivers at all: the East River is a saltwater estuary and the Harlem River is an eight-mile tidal straight. The Hudson is tidal almost as far upstream as Albany and too brackish to drink below Poughkeepsie. According to one chronicler of the city’s water history,* it was the island’s dearth of water that enabled the English to take New Amsterdam from its Dutch inhabitants in a “waterless coup” in 1664.

Continuing scarcity, exacerbated by exponential population and commercial growth in the early 19th century, drove New York to subsidize a series of mammoth engineering projects north of the city. By the time that system was completed in 1911, its 12 reservoirs and three controlled lakes were already inadequate to its needs. So, the city moved northwest, into the Catskill mountains and the Delaware River. Because New Jersey and Pennsylvania already took a lot of water from the Delaware, a 1931 Supreme Court decision was required to allocate distribution among the three claimants. “A river is more than an amenity,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “it is a treasure [that] offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.”

The cost of getting all this water to New York was enormous, both in dollars (billions) and in human disruption (dozens of communities flooded, thousands of people removed, hundreds of workers killed). That the land and homes were condemned through eminent domain enraged the upstate communities, and their animosity toward the city continues to this day.

Still, the city got its water – by 1980, 7.1 million people were using 1.5 billion gallons a day. Even though 90% of it was unfiltered, it was considered among the cleanest water of any city anywhere. But the EPA questioned New York’s ability to continue to provide clean water without filtration and threatened to make it install a plant that would cost billions to build and hundreds of millions to operate. The city didn’t have the money, and the upstream communities were in open revolt against any new watershed regulations, so the state convened all the stakeholders and eventually hammered out an agreement, which included everyone’s input and pleased no one. But it has held. In return for guarantees to protect the distant reservoirs, the city will fund sustainable economic development in the region. Part of that process involved a six-year agreement with the Stroud Water Research Center to analyze all the water sources with the goal of ensuring their future health.

Yet for all the expense, all the displacements, all the hardships, the story of New York’s water is in many ways one of hope.

  • By protecting its upstream sources, the city continues to have some of the cleanest drinking water in the world without requiring a filtration plant.

  • Through infrastructure improvements (including installing meters, which the city hadn’t bothered to do until the 1980s) and conservation efforts, New York has reduced its water consumption by 34%, even as its population grew by 20%.

  • Most important is the recognition that the vast region is a single watershed in which everyone has a common interest. For years, the sheer size of the system and the geographic and demographic differences among its people blocked the development of a unified watershed community, which is the only way to protect both the city’s water and the upstream economies.

    *David Yeats-Thomas, “Mountain Water for a City”

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com