Water Works 1 - 3/4/03

The Call to Arms

Well, they’re at it again. Apparently the NJDEP didn’t quite get the message from our late skirmishes over Sidney Brook and Rockaway Creek. Hunterdon residents will have to join forces once more to prevent the state from destroying another stream here, and more of New Jersey’s drinking water, though the last time I checked we were still paying our fair share of salaries down at NJDEP headquarters in Trenton.

No longer content with jeopardizing a pair of streams, the state has broadened its horizons this time to include the destruction of the headwaters of Lockatong Creek and several square miles of its surrounding aquifer for good measure.

On March 11, the NJDEP will conduct a public hearing at the Franklin Township School on a request for a water allocation by Garden State Growers and Quaker Valley Farms, a local commercial growing complex, which will increase the amount of water pumped at GSG-QVF by 55%, from an aquifer the state has already endangered through a pattern of mismanagement amply documented by its own records.

The proposed allocation will use the same wells GSG-QVF pumped from illegally 5 years ago, when 16 household wells failed in Quakertown. At the time, the NJDEP admitted it had over-allocated water from the Lockatong Creek aquifer. The only action it took was to increase the water allocation for GSG-QVF by 60% the following year. The NJDEP never addressed the matter of the failed wells.

In the area surrounding the GSG-QVF complex and the headwaters of Lockatong Creek near Quakertown, the amount of water now allocated by the NJDEP to several high-volume users nearly equals the total amount of aquifer recharge, and is 5 times the maximum water extraction allowed by the NJDEP’s own Water Supply Master Plan. According to the same plan, all groundwater supplies available to high-capacity users for the entire Lockatong Creek drainage basin have already been allocated, from its headwaters alone.

The state’s plan to pump more water here puts our local water supply at risk, and the approval of this new allocation further endangers the health and safety of everyone who drinks from Lockatong basin aquifers downstream in Delaware and Kingwood townships. It will also irreparably damage the headwaters of Lockatong Creek, a waterway which has been nominated by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network for designation as one of the state’s strictly protected C-1 streams, and which feeds the Delaware and Raritan Canal, a source of drinking water for 500,000 New Jersey residents.

This allocation proposal will certainly be approved unless it meets a large and vocal opposition. Please come to the hearing at the Franklin Township School in Quakertown, on Tuesday, March 11, at 6 pm, and help us stop the NJDEP from inflicting additional harm on a drinking water aquifer and a stream that the NJDEP has systematically abused for years. Perhaps this time they will remember what they hear.

In the meantime, in the next installment of this series we will look at just what the NJDEP knew while they were busy creating this mess.

Watch this space.

Ron Gutkowski