Water Works 28 - 6/2/03

A Few Corrections to the Indictment before We Head Underground

In fairness to the NJDEP, two counts of my indictment-to-date require correction. A few other matters also need attention before we look at how our local public water supply and delivery system functions.

The harm that water mining has already inflicted on the upper Lockatong aquifer can be determined easily enough. By an extension of that same logic the NJDEP’s latest proposal to increase water allocations here will only make matters worse. However, my allegation in Water Works 1, that the NJDEP has already endangered “the health and safety of everyone who drinks from Lockatong basin aquifers downstream in Delaware and Kingwood townships,” overstates what the available evidence supports.

Since that episode, I have seen water quality sampling results showing a respectably healthy Lockatong Creek exiting the far southwestern border of what Fellow Correspondent and I have delineated as its upper watershed. Remarkably so in fact, because upstream from that healthier stretch at Oak Grove the Lockatong is essentially a “dead” waterway, before the less stressed portions of the watershed revive it. Even though the amount of water flowing through Lockatong aquifers downstream will always be limited by the present rate of pumping from the upper watershed, in the absence of any other data that downstream drinking water quality has been compromised, that charge is now dropped. I will alert you if anything new turns up, of course.

I also charged that the NJDEP had “allocated all water supplies available to high-capacity users for the entire Lockatong Creek watershed from the creek’s headwaters alone, according to the NJDEP’s own Water Supply Master Plan” in Water Works 2, which requires some modification.

The key word here is “entire.” Groundwater in the upper Lockatong watershed is undoubtedly being pumped out at 5 to 10 times the NJDEP’s own maximum safe extraction rate, for the first 1.5 miles of a 15-mile-long drainage basin, or the first 5 square miles of an approximately 50-square mile area – the same proportion either way you look at it. If the upper 10% of the watershed is pumped at 5 to 10 times its safe extraction rate, that should equal 50% to 100% of the safe extraction rate for the whole watershed. But it would be unfair to estimate the full productivity of the Lockatong basin using Quakertown’s more extreme geologic conditions alone. What I should have said is that 50% to 100% of a conservative estimate of the safe production capacity of the entire Lockatong basin is now being pumped from the least productive 10% of the basin, which lessens the offense to a still impressive bit of recklessness by any standard.

To those of you who came out here to look around, I apologize if you were confused by the friendly road signs indicating two Lockatong Creeks crossing Pittstown Road down by Oak Grove. I habitually forget that. It makes perfect sense, in a headwaters region, to have more than one Lockatong Creek in the neighborhood, although strict attention to a detail like that seldom extends from the maps to the road signs in most towns.

By way of explanation, while you were here you may also have noticed that the corresponding signs for Capoolong Creek spell that creek’s name two ways on each sign. As anyone who has been warned about us knows, in Franklin Township even narrowing a question like that down to a single answer can cause more trouble than you could possibly believe, which is why you get a choice of spellings. That’s just another one of those things you don’t see every day, which make up Franklin’s peculiar charm: in this instance an eminently prudent resolution to what was a hotly debated topic here a few years ago, in the town that only recently tried to reintroduce dueling to politics.

I have one last clarification before we head underground. So far, I have persistently referred to the Lockatong and Capoolong watersheds as completely separate geographic entities, sharing as their border the small ridge topping the Hunterdon Plateau where Quakertown sits. In one sense they are. Even the NJDEP is not about to argue that rainfall flows uphill to recharge one watershed from the other. But the very distinct surface boundary between the two watersheds takes on a very different meaning down in the bedrock, where there is really only one aquifer instead of two, as my use of the term may have led you to believe. Risking apparent self-contradiction on a matter I was pretty emphatic about in our previous episode, here is the rest of the story – down there, sometimes water really does flow up hills.

We will talk more about the implications of that next week.

Ron Gutkowski