Water Works 26 - 5/5/03

Walnut Creek Explained

“On the ground here, at Muller’s spring,” as the video news people might remind you, our story now enters this third installment of what you recall began as a two-part digression, before last week’s interruption. Regarding all of which, I only note I never suggested this would be either simple or short. However, for those who have begun to really worry, a gathering of our story’s loose ends will be held soon, if my luck holds and if I can keep the digressions under control.

Before we attend to Muller’s spring, we need to get the mystery of Walnut Creek out of the way. But to do justice to that, you first need to know a few things about Pareto. I will be brief. Walnut Creek pained Wilfredo in ways difficult to translate. He was a “numbers guy” among the engineering elite of his era, who later turned to a second career as an economist; an Italian contemporary of the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge and dug the Panama Canal. Like them, he was also a man for whom Walnut Creek would have been a matter of personal honor, no less than professional competence.

If anything, the NJDEP’s error at Walnut Creek recalls the Monty Python sketch in which singing instructors use pictures of harmless looking llamas to warn us about man-eating sharks. In its estimates of recharge values for the aquifer serving Quakertown, the NJDEP plugged llamas, instead of sharks, into a critical calculation of stream “baseflow,” using Walnut Creek instead of streams more representative of geologic conditions here. The result was an aquifer “yield” number about three times higher than our local rocks could ever produce, and a correspondingly higher estimated limit for safe withdrawals of water. Simply put, the NJDEP rigged formulas to produce artificially inflated results.

Walnut Creek indisputably flows through Lockatong shale, about the only trait it shares with the Lockatong Creek headwaters beyond “wet.” Their common geologic identity is overwhelmed by differences that make comparing the two waterways like comparing llamas and sharks.

The bluff above Walnut Creek that we met two weeks ago is a geologically notorious part of the Hunterdon Plateau. It behaves like a buried, burst wineskin of sorts, constantly spouting water through bedrock faults and fractures easily spotted on maps showing almost no such breaks near the Lockatong. Second, the Lockatong headwaters and our aquifer are situated at the very top of the Hunterdon Plateau, where there is absolutely nothing above us. Walnut Creek’s flow was measured at the bottom of a 250-foot hill. Finally, the extensive boggy areas we observed up on that bluff, and upstream in Barton Hollow, indicate hydrologic environments uncommon near Quakertown’s end of the plateau. Most professional geologists would not consider the terrain near Walnut Creek to be representative of anything other than an exceptionally high water yield for Lockatong shale, anywhere, and would certainly not use it to represent conditions near Quakertown.

Walnut Creek was chosen as the stand-in for the Lockatong by the Hydrogeology Section Chief of the New Jersey Geologic Survey’s Bureau of Water Resources (i), which should indicate how important our local water war is to the NJDEP, just as the use of Walnut Creek indicates how far New Jersey’s “environmental cops” are prepared to go to win it. That stance may seem to be at odds with NJDEP Commissioner Campbell’s recent nomination of Lockatong Creek as a C-1 stream. It will seem more familiar if you recall the cause of our late C-1 battles for Sidney Brook and Rockaway Creek, when the same NJDEP that said it wanted to preserve both of those streams seemed no less determined to destroy them.

The story of Sidney Brook and Rockaway Creek had a happy ending, but the Lockatong’s may not. Unless the NJDEP remedies the harm its water allocation policies have already inflicted on our aquifer, the Lockatong headwaters will remain the one part of the entire creek that will probably fail to meet C-1 water quality standards. And, because of the allocation commitments it has already made here, about the only way the NJDEP can avoid that embarrassing prospect is to deploy more Walnut Creek math.

Even a digression as tempting as that will not be allowed to distract me from our main story, which has made respectable progress in this session despite our not having moved at all. As a result, the next Water Works will begin again at Muller’s spring in Quakertown, when we will at least try to reach Trout’s pond and the end of the block: where Wilfredo will stand lookout for the Campbell Gang while I make a desperate attempt at a summary.

Ron Gutkowski