Water Works 47 - 3/29/04

The Attack of the Mine Canaries

Two weeks ago at Franklin Town Hall, Fellow Correspondent and I were looking at an engineer’s plan to subdivide some farmland on the outskirts of Quakertown. The tract is just south of the village. After we had examined the plan for a while, my friend got up and walked over to a set of large maps that hang at the front of the meeting room. They show the town’s topography, geologic formations, soils and such. He pulled one down, brought it back to the table and pointed to a large patch of wetlands on it, right in the middle of the same farm. At the same spot on the engineer’s map – based on a recent NJDEP survey of the site – no wetlands.

We’ve grown used to that by now. What disturbed me most this time was that I never knew those missing wetlands had ever existed. They could not have been seen from the road, and like the wet patches that remained at the edges of those fields they had no obvious outlet to a stream. Fellow Correspondent had seen them. To anyone who had not, he explained, the elevation of the visible wetlands nearby and a tell-tale dip in the topography on the engineer’s map were clues that groundwater should have been seeping up into the soil there.

Before they vanished, those wetlands were last spotted only 1,000 feet from another patch of wetlands, visibly shrinking for years, at the head of the longest branch of Lockatong Creek. (Map) This latest disappearance was in the Capoolong Creek drainage basin, where it borders the Lockatong basin at the top of the Hunterdon Plateau. (44) Both patches of land are no more than 2,000 feet from the largest single concentration of NJDEP-certified wells pumping here. They are even closer to all that pumping than the two largest clusters of failed household wells in Quakertown, which are about 3,000 feet from the same NJDEP-certified wells. (22) The large agricultural wells here can easily pull water farther than that. (30)

What do disappearing wetlands tell us? Like baseflow in our creeks, each of those patches of what should be perennially saturated soil is another “visible tip” of the water stored in our bedrock. (46) They are parts of the same hydrologic system. Low baseflow in Lockatong Creek means an equally low recharge rate in the aquifer that feeds it. Shrinking wetlands at the head of the Lockatong and in the fields nearby say unmistakably – the amount of water in our aquifer is shrinking.

The amount of water in our aquifer and the recharge that refills our aquifer control the purity of the water we drink. In our local water supply and purification system the bedrock below us is our water treatment plant. The water contained there dilutes the sewage effluent that flows from our septic tanks too. An aquifer’s natural recharge is the amount of water that should refill it every year. (2, 46) An aquifer’s safe limit for extractions is a calculated fraction of its recharge. When you pump water from an aquifer in excess of the safe limit, you reduce the amount of water left behind to dilute contaminants. That degrades water quality. Even a child can grasp that concept (3), without knowing what “nitrate dilution” or “public health and safety” mean.

The NJDEP more than merely agreed with us once about the aquifer recharge rates that justify Franklin’s zoning and water protection plan. (33) It worked very closely with us to calculate them. The state now claims the recharge rate for Quakertown’s aquifer is almost 6 times larger than the rate the state endorsed. That higher rate sets the safe limit for water extractions here almost 6 times higher too. (3) The NJDEP has already permitted 5 times more water extractions than the lower recharge rate allows. (28) The amount of water pumping permitted near Quakertown effectively voids any protection that Franklin’s zoning provides for our drinking water, but the state won’t admit that.

Instead, as we have seen, the NJDEP distorted both facts and logic when it chose not to investigate Quakertown’s failed wells. (39-41) After those wells failed, it ignored Lockatong Creek flow data indicating low aquifer recharge here when it increased the amount of water pumped near Quakertown by 60% during a record drought. (45, 40) It approved that increase without any impact studies. It knew our water already showed elevated concentrations of nitrates – the “mine canary” of water quality – 2 years earlier, when it publicly endorsed a recharge rate for Quakertown’s aquifer only one-sixth as large as the rate it is using now.

Our vanishing wetlands prove beyond doubt that the amount of water pumped from our aquifer far exceeds safe limits. To suggest that the NJDEP has left Quakertown sitting on an environmental time-bomb of the NJDEP’s making is no exaggeration.

Ron Gutkowski