The New York city Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced that it received positive midpoint revisions to its 10-year waiver to continue delivering unfiltered drinking water from its Catskill and Delaware water supply systems.
“This newly revised waiver confirms the success of DEP’s extraordinary efforts to protect the drinking water supply and provide the highest quality drinking water in the world to the nearly 10 million New Yorkers we serve,” said DEP Commissioner Rohit T. Aggarwala. “Our investments in and partnerships with watershed farms, communities and neighbors have paid dividends protecting our most precious resource, and we will continue our focus on the watershed’s natural infrastructure while gratefully acknowledging the many partners who help promote and administer our vast watershed protection programs.”
The waiver, known as a Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD), was released in December 2017 and revised today by the New York State Department of Health (DOH). The city has committed an estimated $1 billion throughout the duration of the FAD by administering programs that protect the upstate reservoirs and the vast watershed lands that surround them in order to ensure the continued high quality of the city’s drinking water supply.
The revisions incorporated recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine leading to a 43 percent reduction in the 7-year solicitation goal for the city’s upstate watersheds’ land acquisition programs through 2024.
Among the revisions, for example, the original 2017 FAD required the city’s various land acquisition programs to collectively solicit 350,000 acres of watershed land during the 7-year period 2018-2024. The revised FAD lowers that solicitation goal to 200,000 acres. The city has already solicited nearly 149,000 acres through 2022 representing almost 75 percent of the total revised 7-year goal. Additionally, the National Academies recommended focusing land acquisition solicitations to acreage most critical to water quality protection.
“This would allow NYC DEP to make strategic investments that prevent deleterious land use change on sensitive sites without unduly impeding economic vitality in the (Catskill and Delaware watersheds) region,” according to the National Academies’ Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program report.
Other revisions to the FAD include a new economic vitality study recommended by the National Academies, to be funded by the city, that will assess the social character and economic well-being of watershed communities. The revised FAD also includes an evaluation of areas in the Kensico Reservoir basin for potential future sewer connections, an extension of a pilot collaboration between the federal Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program and the city-funded Catskill Streams Buffer Initiative, and a requirement for the Stream Management Program to nominate three more water quality projects in the Ashokan Reservoir basin.
Since the city received its first filtration waiver in the early 1990s, DEP has protected sensitive lands around the city’s upstate reservoirs, invested in private and municipal wastewater systems and upgrades, forged partnerships with watershed farmers, and focused considerable attention on the forests, streams, and wetlands that comprise the natural infrastructure of the water supply region.
These efforts, paired with a robust program of water quality testing and infrastructure improvements, have allowed the city to avoid the construction of a costly filtration plant for its Catskill and Delaware source water supplies.
The city’s water supply is comprised of three distinct systems covering approximately 2,000 square miles: the Croton, Catskill and Delaware systems.
The three systems’ 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes work in concert to meet the demands of 8.5 million consumers in the five boroughs of New York City, and another 1 million people in four counties north of the city. The systems altogether deliver about 1 billion gallons of drinking water each day.
The Catskill and Delaware systems comprise the largest unfiltered water supply in the United States, delivering about 90 percent of New York City’s water on a typical day. Millions of laboratory tests in the city and the watershed show that water from these two systems continues to meet the stringent criteria to avoid filtration. The Croton System became a filtered supply in 2015. It supplies about 10 percent of the city’s water on average.
A key element of New York City’s success in watershed protection has been the development of strong relationships with watershed communities, locally based organizations, environmental groups, and federal, state and local government agencies. While the watershed protection programs are fully funded by city water rate payers, most of them are administered by watershed-based entities that partner with DEP to protect the water supply from environmental degradation or potential sources of contamination.
Including the current FAD, the city has committed more than $2.7 billion toward its watershed protection programs since 1993, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency first issued the city a waiver from the federal requirement to filter tap water that comes from surface sources such as reservoirs.
DEP’s source water protection initiatives and achievements have included:
