Water Works 44 - 2/19/04

How We Got Our Name

Water Works needs to lighten up a bit. If we’re going to talk about stream channeling properly we can’t afford to start channeling Wilfredo again. (Episode 34, if you must know.) A geography lesson should do the trick. Playing with maps seems to improve the mood around here as much as burrowing underground does. It’s a good way to ease into the subject of low stream flows too. So – let’s take our story from the D&R Canal, where we left you last week, back up the Lockatong to the top of the Hunterdon Plateau.

Two miles east of the Lockatong Creek headwaters, on the south face of the ridge at the summit of the Hunterdon Plateau between Quakertown and Cherryville, another stream starts – Wickecheoke Creek. If you know the old covered bridge near Sergeantsville, you know the Wickecheoke. Both creeks trace almost parallel courses down to the D&R Canal. On any county map showing our main waterways you can easily imagine the borders of the stream watersheds around their upstream branches. (Map, 29) Almost all the land that drains directly into the first four miles of the canal where it runs along the Delaware River above Stockton is in the Lockatong and Wickecheoke basins.

From Stockton the D&R Canal follows the Delaware to Trenton, where it leaves the river, veers north across the state and then angles east along the Raritan River for a while, before it finally joins the Raritan at New Brunswick. Aside from providing some great parks along the way, the canal is a flowing, linear water reservoir serving 500,000 people – that’s 10 Parsippanys. (43) (i)

If you head up-river along the Raritan from New Brunswick you will eventually meet Capoolong Creek where it joins the river here in Franklin. Follow the Capoolong to its source and you end up back on the ridge between Quakertown and Cherryville that we left just a few moments ago. You are on its northern, Raritan slope this time. The top of that ridge is the border the Capoolong watershed shares with the Lockatong and Wickecheoke basins on the Delaware side. (29)

Meanwhile, back at the Raritan, less than a mile up-river from Capoolong Creek a fourth stream joins us – Sidney Brook. When it first arrives on the other side of town it’s no more than a collection of rivulets you can cross a step at a time, down in that scrubby patch of bottom land at the foot of the Milligan farm, where Pittstown Road heads up to the Interstate. Sidney Brook flows through only a mile or so of Franklin, but it’s a full-grown stream by the time it reaches the Raritan.

Water from Sidney Brook and the Capoolong, and water from several square miles of Franklin that drain directly into the Raritan River is all “local” water to 750,000 consumers – or 15 more Parsippanys – downstream.

Franklin Township is an integral component of a water supply and delivery system serving 1.25 million people. The headwaters and longest branches of the Lockatong and the Wickecheoke start here. The headwaters of Capoolong Creek start on the other side of the same ridge. All start at the highest elevations on the Hunterdon Plateau. The headwaters of Sidney Brook become a real stream in Franklin, and we feed miles of the Raritan directly where the river is barely 100 feet wide.

The water we supply to that system ends its journey below a spillway by the old Landing Lane bridge in New Brunswick, 35 miles downstream from the mouth of Capoolong Creek and 50 stream-miles from the Lockatong. Even there, fresh water from the D&R Canal and the upper Raritan helps keep the salt tides from encroaching too far up-river from Raritan Bay.

Maintaining that system and others like it in good working order is essential if New Jersey is to grow and prosper in any way. Pick any future you want – they all require water. There is one unavoidable “growth strategy” that all factions in that debate should never forget. It will cost us all a lot of money to engineer replacements for the Hunterdon Plateau watersheds, the D&R Canal and the upper Raritan. Morris County has its Parsippanys, but it also has a “Great Swamp,” which feeds and tames the formidable Passaic River. What do you think it will take to re-design and re-build things like that, and where will we find the water to fill whatever we come up with, if not in places like Franklin?

Long before Jim McGreevey’s water protection initiatives, as far back as Tom Kean’s administration, it was understood that Quakertown’s piece of the Hunterdon Plateau was critical to the state’s water supply. According to the State Plan it still is. (39) That is why stream flows at Quakertown’s end of the supply lines, in the Lockatong, Capoolong and Wickecheoke basins, should concern us. If I’m right, there is evidence in those creek beds of serious malfunction in need of repair. We will look into that next.

Ron Gutkowski