Some residents say agencies keep reservoirs too full

By Alexa James

Times Herald-Record

March 07, 2008 6:00 AM

Overflowing reservoirs are an ominous sight to folks living downstream, especially with heavy rain and flood watches in the forecast.

"If the dams are full and a storm is coming into the Catskills, it's always trouble," said James Tierney, assistant commissioner for water resources with the State Department of Conservation. "This area is very susceptible to flash floods. If there was more void space in those reservoirs, it certainly would help."

Reservoirs with void space can hold or slow potentially devastating amounts of precipitation and snow melt.

But there are no voids in the Delaware Basin Reservoirs, which supply roughly 50 percent of New York City's drinking water, or about 600 million gallons daily.

All four reservoirs in this area — the Rondout in Ulster County, Neversink in Sullivan County and the Pepacton and Cannonsville reservoirs in Delaware County — were overflowing yesterday, said the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the system.

That's infuriated some folks living downstream who have been bracing for bad weather this weekend.

Charles Schroeder, who owns a home in Hancock, said the DEC is keeping the reservoirs unnecessarily full and conducting ill-timed maintenance projects on the aqueduct system.

"They don't need the water they're banking," he said. "They're playing with our lives and our homes."

The reservoirs are full, in part, because of an elaborate repair project the DEP started last month on the Rondout-West Branch Tunnel.

The 45-mile-long shaft has been leaking 10 million to 36 million gallons every day for nearly two decades. Starting Feb. 20, the DEP sent teams of divers into the tunnel shaft to gather preliminary data for potential repair plans.

To conduct that work, the DEP had to stop diversions to New York City from the Cannonsville, Pepacton and Neversink reservoirs, which feed more than 500 million gallons into the tunnel daily. The stopped-up water either sits in the reservoirs or gets released downstream.

Hence, the nervousness from folks like Schroeder, who belong to a DEP watchdog group called Drowning on the Delaware.

The DEP maintains it is managing the reservoirs according to protocol and doing its part to mitigate flooding.

Reservoir releases were reduced yesterday to relieve some pressure on waterways downstream.

Diversions will resume from the Pepacton and Neversink reservoirs today, the DEP said, and from the Cannonsville site by Monday.

The timing of the tunnel project coincided with a lower-demand period from New York City, said DEP Deputy Commissioner Paul Rush.

Critics wonder why the DEP didn't draw the reservoirs lower before it started the repair project. It may be following protocol, said Tierney, but the protocol needs improving.

"If the reservoirs are managed so that there's more void space," he said, "then when a storm hits, like the one that's been forecast this weekend, you're certainly better off."

ajames@th-record.com