Water Works 38 - 12/15/03

The NJDEP Drops 10,000 People Next to Quakertown

We looked at how an old-timer might assay Quakertown’s water supply, in our last episode. Though most of them were still convinced there was “plenty of water down there” when wells began to run dry here, it was a stretch to believe the NJDEP’s claim that drought was the only cause. We all know better. If that was true, wells in the wettest part of Quakertown should have been among the last to fail – not the first.

A review of the NJDEP’s case for drought as the lone culprit will require some number crunching again. Before we go there, let’s review a few geographic, demographic and hydrologic characteristics of the place Water Works calls “here” that you will not find among the NJDEP’s findings of fact.

On any road south from Clinton to Quakertown, and you can spot more houses than you suspect tucked in those small valleys you cross on your way, if you know where to look. But when you finally reach the top ridge of the Hunterdon Plateau all guessing stops. Everything changes. The landscape flattens out and your horizons suddenly widen. Just south of Quakertown you can see clear to Pennsylvania, and most of the houses beyond the farmsteads and homes along the roadside here are surrounded by farmed fields. Follow Lockatong Creek all the way to Stockton and you won’t see much else, even when you finally drop off the plateau, into the hollows where the creek snakes down to the Delaware.

What you see between Quakertown and Stockton can be startling if you’re not prepared for it. The farms here in Franklin make up just one piece of a long, broad swath of some of the best agricultural land anywhere in the state. Where it crosses the Hunterdon Plateau its soils are so good you can even farm the top of our stump of water-resistant Lockatong shale and do a good job of it. That band of farms winds more than 17 miles through Hunterdon County, up the Delaware River from Sourland Mountain to the Highlands. It reaches 11 miles into the very heart of the county at Quakertown. It’s one-third of Hunterdon. And, because so much of everything here is farmed land, it’s one of the least populated places in northern New Jersey and the entire New York City metropolitan area.

We have fewer people here than most of southern New Jersey’s famous Pinelands. Together, the Hunterdon townships of East and West Amwell, Delaware, Kingwood, Alexandria and Franklin have a population density of 132 people per square mile. That is almost exactly Franklin’s density, and it is lower than the population density in any of the towns that make up 72% of the land regulated by the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan. The only major differences in that regard, between our one-third of Hunterdon and the Pinelands, are the sheer size of the Pinelands tract and the scarcity of people in a few very large townships there. But the fact remains: we are less crowded here than 72% of the Pinelands.

Franklin and its neighbors are hardly the little towns that time forgot. In Franklin alone we have 30% more people than we had 20 years ago, about average growth for townships like ours in that period, in both Hunterdon and the Pinelands. Most of Franklin’s growth has been concentrated north of the Hunterdon Plateau, almost hidden in that hilly and wooded half of town you see from the roads on your way from Clinton to Quakertown. Relatively few new homes were added on the plateau in the upper Lockatong and Capoolong watersheds here.

As a result, Quakertown’s aquifer has never been stressed by household water consumption. Despite that, household use standards are a good way to understand the impact of the NJDEP’s agricultural water allocations here. The largest one near Quakertown permits 96 million gallons of water to be pumped from the Lockatong basin each year, to irrigate 163 acres of land. More than 2,600 people in more than 900 homes would use less water, living there. What the NJDEP did on that 163 acres was like dropping 80% of Franklin Township’s whole population on it – at an effective density of more than 10,000 people per square mile – next door to the small village of Quakertown, up on the Hunterdon Plateau.

The NJDEP never questioned whether that’s more of an impact than our aquifer can handle. When you ask some of our old-timers why so many Quakertown wells have failed, they blame the handful of new homes added to the neighborhood in the past 20 years. “Impossible,” they say, when anyone tries to tell them what you just read. Our old-timers are not alone there. Who wouldn’t find it hard to believe our state’s Department of Environmental Protection did exactly that in a place like this?

Ron Gutkowski