Water Works 45 - 3/5/04

Dry Washes and Flashy Streams -or- The NJDEP Is Smarter than You Think

The streams of the Hunterdon Plateau will never be postcard pretty. Unless you know how “flashy” creeks behave, you might find yourself more alarmed than you should be after studying the Lockatong at the D&R Canal or the Wickecheoke by the bridge near Sergeantsville.

Both creeks probably started looking the way they do a long time ago, about when the first orders for cut hardwood arrived in Hunterdon from colonial Philadelphia and New York. And plows did more than till fields here – some of the first iron moldboards made in America were forged in Pittstown. Peaches, chickens and dairy herds shaped our landscape too. The Hunterdon Plateau has been hard-worked land for centuries, which makes our creeks naturally prone to flash flooding.

A force of nature that can roll 100-pound boulders for miles and yank grown trees from the ground will carve a wide path through anything. But there is no escaping a sense that the Lockatong creek bed often seems much too big for the small amount of water running through it, and that the gullies and washes that feed it between the plateau and the canal are deeper and dryer then they should be.

Gauged stream flows reinforce that impression. Consider the differences between low water flows in Lockatong Creek and two neighboring creeks, the Alexauken and the Nishiskawick. In record dry spells 5 to 7 times more water flowed through Alexauken Creek than through the Lockatong, though the Alexauken basin drains a third less land. At least 3 times more water flowed through the even smaller Nishiskawick. (i) But those numbers miss almost all the impact that NJDEP-permitted water pumping has had here, because stream flows have not been recorded in Lockatong Creek since 1978.

Ronald Reagan had not yet become President Reagan then. To grasp the consequences of that lapse, think for a moment about the forecasting that determines whether your employer will add or cut staff, for example, or how much tax revenue your town will spend. Now just imagine, as far ahead as you care to project, that any “baseline” figures used for those calculations will always be 25 years old or older.

That is exactly where the NJDEP has left the Lockatong watershed. It never kept a water use budget here, and the only figures it has to balance the books now are decades out of date. A “water budget” is no mere figure of speech either – it’s as real as any corporate or government account. Inflows, outflows, surpluses and deficits are terms hydrogeologists routinely use. A watershed’s assets consist of the land capable of returning water to it. Land that can’t is a liability. Profits and losses are deposits and withdrawals of water. The “bottom line” is the difference between the amount of water that leaves a drainage basin, for any reason, and the amount of water that remains in its bedrock.

By that standard the Lockatong watershed is running a serious deficit. The amount of water pumped from its aquifer has critically depleted water reserves that should be replenished from year to year. (2) Those reserves provide protection from droughts, and offset the kind of weather we’ve had lately, when our frozen soils prevented the snow that covered everything here a month ago from reaching our bedrock as fresh water. We’ve had other winters when a few warm, sunny days turned a late February snow melt into a stroke of good luck, if March turned out too dry or too wet for a proper recharge. (32)

That’s the way we have to think up here. The Lockatong and Wickecheoke are geologic rarities. No other streams in New Jersey start in beds of nearly unfractured and unfaulted Lockatong argillites and run through them for as long as the Lockatong and Wickecheoke do. (31) I’ve heard their nearest kin can be found somewhere in Maine. But we can bring the impacts of water mining on stream flows here a little closer to home for you by comparing Quakertown’s situation to the recent Windy Acres controversy in Clinton Township, which you recall also involved the NJDEP.

Windy Acres would have put 911 homes on a 292 acre tract. Just one of the NJDEP-endorsed water extractions near Quakertown alone is equivalent to 900 homes on only 163 acres. (38) Windy Acres would have returned 90% of the water it used to Rockaway Creek – as sewage treatment plant effluent, unfortunately – while our agricultural-use example returns only 10% of 96 million gallons of water pumped from the Lockatong headwaters every year. (ii) The state also permits another 241 million gallons of water to be pumped from other sites nearby. (2) The impact of all that pumping on Lockatong Creek has never been measured.

What does that tell us? Simply – the NJDEP knows at least two good ways to kill a creek, and seems to be succeeding with one of them.

Ron Gutkowski