Water Works 22 - 4/7/03

Voodoo Hydrogeology Made Simple

If you are still here after 21 episodes of Water Works, you know the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s promotion of aquifer mining in the upper Lockatong watershed is a demanding subject. You can certainly appreciate the eye-glazing and mind-numbing impact of the NJDEP-speak that my fellow Water Works correspondent has wrestled into virtually audible shouts of alarm in the language the rest of us share.

The NJDEP’s signature style almost had me nodding off the other night as I plodded right into: “The irrigation system piping for Agricultural Certification No. HN0005 and proposed Agricultural Certification No. HN0017 are interconnected,” (i) and suddenly found myself wide awake and not quite sure why.

I recalled having read something a lot like that once. I eventually found it in the NJDEP’s “Cease Water Diversions” order to Garden State Growers, from October, 1998, regarding one of the illegal pumping incidents previously reported here. There I read: “GSG must also remove all piping from the well heads of Well #6, Well #7, and Well #8 which are currently tied to the on-site irrigation system.” (ii) I realized then that I had again stumbled over the NJDEP’s habit of rehabilitating violations of law by transforming them into respectable “findings of fact,” which the quote that so rudely woke me was, in the “Draft Report” of the NJDEP’s proposal to increase the water allocation for GSG and Quaker Valley Farms. (iii)

I will wager that from the NJDEP’s belated discovery in October, 1998 of illegal wells at GSG to its official endorsement for the use of those wells in July, 1999, the NJDEP took no action to remove the irrigation piping connected to them, pursuant to its 1998 order. I know the NJDEP does not know how much water Quaker Valley supplies to the Garden State greenhouses, and how much water Garden State supplies to the Quaker Valley mum fields, through their shared irrigation system. I can guarantee the NJDEP knew that little about that relationship in 1999, when it legalized the illicit plumbing, and in 1997 and 1998, when GSG violated state regulations and the NJDEP legalized that too.

Those interconnected sets of several wells, which is what “HN0005” and “HN0017” mean in concert, are “Exhibit A” for the NJDEP’s willful denial of the obvious. The distortions of distance, topography and local geology involved are less spectacular than mistaking Pennsylvania for New Jersey, as we recalled in Water Works 13, but far more destructive in effect. My recent close encounter with NJDEP paperwork and irrigation plumbing is of course another example of the NJDEP staying one step ahead of its own rules and re-writing its own history, and of its propensity no matter where it begins here to end just down the road from reality.

Our reality check starts in front of the Quakertown General Store, where Route 579 turns south on the way from Pittstown to Oak Grove and Croton. That high ground and most of Quakertown, sloping down to the west, are close within the southernmost boundary of the Capoolong Creek watershed, which flows north to the Raritan River. Most of the wells, springs and ponds that have failed here are located in the Capoolong basin: in or near views from the store, west toward Pittstown and south toward Oak Grove. The cause of those failures has never been determined by the NJDEP, which should be remembered and will become important to our discussion. (Map)

If you walk south on Croton Road from the General Store to the top of the first small rise beyond the village and face southwest there, you stand looking down the fall line of the 15-mile-long Lockatong watershed. Your view from the summit and first headwaters of the entire Lockatong basin is dominated by the Garden State and Quaker Valley horticultural complex – the greenhouses in terraced rows along the higher ground closest to you, north of the mum fields below, and between them the irrigation pipes connecting the sets of wells named HN0005 and HN0017 – and a narrow strand of trees winding out toward the complex from Croton Road, where Lockatong Creek first seeps up from the wetland scrub at the edge of that grove, heading for the Delaware River directly between both sets of wells.

The NJDEP’s voodoo begins right there, on a growing complex that requires square miles of land to supply the water it consumes on only 163 acres. The state believes that has no impact whatsoever on Lockatong Creek, Capoolong Creek, their aquifers or anything else in the neighborhood. In our next episode we will begin to unpack that claim and weigh the NJDEP’s reality against the one the rest of us use every day.

Ron Gutkowski