Water Works 41 - 1/21/04

We Question the NJDEP’s Integrity

“Come, Wilfredo. The game is afoot!” – is too obvious a display of stolen goods to cue our faithful companion’s return. No, any fellow who keeps us flat-footed on the ground the way Wilfredo does, who never lets us forget the capital mistake we make when we theorize in advance of facts, who – No, Pareto deserves better than that.

Wilfredo Pareto is one of the immortals of business process analysis. He may be Henry Laurence Gantt’s only peer. You’re not impressed? Just how many tools for reckoning that you use every day come with someone’s name attached? Even in Edison, New Jersey, people use light bulbs, not “Edisons.” But in any business or technical setting where data must be kept in good order, just suggest using a “Pareto” or a “Gantt” for some purpose and it’s not likely you will be asked to explain what you mean. Or you may have met Pareto through his “80-20” rule, in a question like: “What percent of our company’s profits (or losses) are produced by (your choice) percent of our products?”

A serious answer requires that you examine all – meaning “all,” Commissioner – of the data relevant to the question. That is a rule any investigator worthy of the title in any field knows, and what Wilfredo is really all about. And you don’t have to be an eccentric genius in a deerstalker cap – troubleshooting a stalled lawn-mower will do – to grasp elementary hypothesis testing: “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” Those are the two minimal requirements for adult thinking about what causes what in our world. Of course a good regression equation is a handy tool when nothing else will do, but it’s worthless without standards for collecting and evaluating evidence – Pareto’s, as common as spreadsheet software today, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s, common knowledge a hundred years ago to fans of pulp detective fiction everywhere.

The NJDEP’s work here doesn’t meet that standard of integrity. “Integrity” isn’t too strong a word. It’s the most precise, in fact. Think of what the structural integrity of a house or a bridge means – free from defects or weak links that fail under stress. Integrity is as critical to things we build from facts and logic as it is to things made of concrete and steel. We describe organizations and people that way too. And when we do, we are saying we trust that what they tell us won’t collapse into a pile of nonsense under the stress of a few questions.

One last look at Fact-Finder Gheen’s inquiry into our failed wells will show you what I mean. Gheen says most of the failures here were near high ground. (39) It’s true that Quakertown sits at one of the highest points in New Jersey’s Piedmont physiographic province (31), and that wells failed near the higher ground here. But Gheen omits an equally obvious fact. Wells also failed at the lowest elevation in the village, in a greenswale which acts as a natural hydraulic collector (34), between a pair of higher ridges that force water down into it, including water from the high ground Gheen noted. (23) He also says “many” of the failed wells here were shallow and “numerous” deeper wells had been drilled nearby. (39) Don’t be misled. He is describing a rural village of about 50 homes, with another 50 homes strung along large farmed fields on its border.

Gheen seems to conclude – it’s hard to tell exactly – that shallow wells on higher ground failed because they could not compete for water against deeper household wells. (30-31) High volume irrigation pumping in the same neighborhood, with a water-use impact equivalent to 900 homes, at an effective population density comparable to Newark’s or Trenton’s, was not considered a probable cause. Instead, blame was placed on household wells belonging to some of the 100 homes in the area, which has a population density comparable to the state’s Pinelands region. (38)

What Gheen’s conclusion really means is – the very modest demands of the relatively few, newer household wells added here strain our aquifer’s resources to the point where it can’t provide water to older, shallower wells. If he’s right, we have a far worse problem on our hands than the one we thought we had.

That aside, Gheen and his NJDEP still have some explaining to do. The state’s own guidelines say that at least 5 times more water has been pumped from our aquifer for years, than should ever have been pumped from the environmentally sensitive summit of a pair of C-1 grade watersheds. (36) Commissioner Campbell’s “environmental cops” at the Bureau of Water Allocation should not need Wilfredo to tell them – until their thinking shows more integrity, their actions (40) will never make sense.

Ron Gutkowski