Water Works 50 - 4/30/04

Dogs That Bark and Dogs That Don’t

If the charges I leveled at the NJDEP last week disturbed you, I have more bad news. What the state tried to achieve by lying should trouble you as much as the deception itself. What should be rightly considered as evidence of deranged thinking is state policy. And if you were thinking Quakertown is the only place facing a problem like ours – this is where we pull the rest of you into our story.

In the NJDEP’s March, 2003 proposal to increase water mining here, its stated concern for the replenishment of our local water supply was – that the amount of water pumped from the Lockatong watershed headwaters did not exceed the safe limit set for the entire watershed by the state’s Water Supply Master Plan. All the pumping the state has permitted in the watershed is concentrated near Quakertown – in the uppermost 5 square miles of a 23-square mile basin. The impact of removing that much water from that small portion of the basin was not considered relevant.

Let’s look at what the state ignored. The 5 square miles of the upper Lockatong watershed extend south from Quakertown, where the creek starts. (2, 22) The highest concentration of water pumping here, 96 million gallons a year on 163 acres, is closest to the village. That is a water use impact equivalent to 900 homes. Another 241 million gallons of water is pumped from the rest of that 5-square mile area, equivalent to an additional 2,300 homes. The combined total – 337 million gallons, or 3,200 homes – is at least 14 times the number of real homes in the same area. (38)

But household-use comparisons understate the impact of agricultural pumping. Households return about 90% of the water they use back to the aquifer. Agricultural irrigation returns only 10%. (45) That makes the actual water consumption impact of those 3,200 virtual homes 9 times higher than real ones – about 126 times the level of real household water consumption here – comparable to 5 square miles of Newark or Trenton.

That is the amount of water mined from the first 2 miles of the 15-mile Lockatong watershed every year, where Lockatong Creek is still small enough to cross with one good jump. The state says the impact of all the pumping concentrated here should be measured against the full length of the creek. We’re naturally skeptical that water in Lockatong aquifers downstream will flow up to the summit of the Hunterdon Plateau, to recharge the aquifer at its headwaters. (46, 44) That is about as likely to happen as Lockatong Creek flowing backwards.

The volume of water now pumped from the Lockatong headwaters is at least 4.8 times the safe limit for the headwaters region. The amount the state wants to add will raise that to 5.6. (2, 3) In that light, I should clarify a charge I made last week – that the NJDEP falsified evidence to make the entire Lockatong watershed appear 6 times more productive than it really is. As you know, the state substituted Walnut Creek for Lockatong Creek and doubled the size of the Lockatong basin in its calculations. The truth is, the state only deceived us 3.8 times more than it should have on that count. The recharge rate I accidentally used then was Fellow Correspondent’s. (9) It’s closer to Lockatong baseflows than the more liberal rate the state should have used and did not.

The result with either rate says – even if you believe creeks flow backwards, there is not enough recharge in the entire Lockatong watershed to supply the amount of water now pumped from its headwaters alone.

The NJDEP never compared the amount of water pumped locally against a recharge rate for 5 square miles of local bedrock. The recharge rate the state once publicly ratified here is a drought-based 110,000 gallons of water per acre of land, per year. (32, 48) If we convert the state’s own rate to 5 square miles, the result is 348 million gallons of recharge for the Lockatong headwaters. The state’s safe limit for water extractions is 20% of recharge, or 70 million gallons. The amount of water pumped here with the state’s approval is 337 million gallons. (2) According to the state, that is 4.8 times the amount that should be pumped. For safety’s sake, Water Works rounds that to 5.

That simple model of real world conditions is against state policy. The NJDEP would rather measure the impacts of concentrated pumping in our watershed’s headwaters on the basis of an entire watershed – or two. So, if you live near a highly consumptive agricultural water use, a water company supply well, or a residential neighborhood served by a local well and a public sewer system, you should ask the NJDEP whether the local impacts of those water extractions have been understated as a matter of policy. And while you’re at it – for safety’s sake – ask if lying is still a policy too.

Ron Gutkowski