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You might not know what “turbidity” is but it’s a long-standing issue in the city’s Catskills watershed—one that climate change is likely to exacerbate.
Historically known as black bear, bobcat and beaver country, the Catskills have become popular for trout fishing and bald eagle spotting, due in part because of how we get our drinking water.
Cracks in the 85-mile-long Delaware Aqueduct are leaking up to 35 million gallons a day and threaten the largest source of New York City drinking water. A huge repair job is underway, and consumers will have to conserve water to help make it work.
FEMA deals didn’t work for many upstate residents affected by 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene. So New York’s DEP is offering to buy some homeowners out—a way to improve city-watershed relations and pick up small but important tracts of land.
Since 1997, New York City has spent $438 million to protect 135,149 acres of land in the Catskill/Delaware watershed, a land area greater than Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens combined. Decades-old resentment in watershed towns has eased, but there are still points of tension.
From 2007 through 2014, nearly 5,000 people were “permanently excluded” from NYCHA because of an arrest—not necessarily a conviction—on or near NYCHA property.
The scene at the former Fresh Kills landfill, of beautiful scenery built about decades of bad trash policy, gives reason for optimism that the city will find a way to deal with the rising costs of managing waste. But it will take a change in mindset, not just policy.
From upstate Seneca County to the banks of the Delaware River, people who live near landfills and trash-burning energy plants are parsing Mayor de Blasio’s “zero waste” pledge—and taking action to reduce the impact of our trash on their lives.
Seattle, Boulder and Ljubljana (that’s in Slovenia) have employed approaches that New York City might find instructive as it chases Mayor de Blasio’s “zero waste to landfills” goal.
New York is diverting more and more organic material like food waste from landfills to composting projects. The big challenge might not be collecting the stuff, but figuring out where to put it all.
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