| Smooth sampling in New York
As fall casts its colors across the Catskills, the Stroud Center's field crews are wrapping up their second season of sampling the streams and reservoirs that provide New York City's enviable water supply.
Charles Dow, the Center's New York project coordinator, said he was happy with the way the sampling operation had progressed this year.
"It went much more smoothly than last year," said Dr. Dow.
Unless the watershed is hit by a late-season hurricane or some other disaster the sampling is expected to be completed a month earlier than in 2000, when heavy storms, bureaucratic delays and other problems slowed things down.
Sampling the streams and reservoirs across the 2,000 square miles of watersheds that supply the city's water is a massive undertaking. The project, which is being conducted with state and federal funding under contract to New York State, involves all research and administrative sections of the Stroud Center.
The Center was selected to do the project because increasing development in the watersheds is threatening the high quality of the city's unfiltered drinking water and more baseline data were needed from the streams. Some nine million city and suburban dwellers use the water, and in the face of the pressures on the watersheds, the Environmental Protection Agency had ordered the city to build a filtration plant at a cost of about $6 billion. This was an expense the city wanted very much to avoid.
But this summer the E.P.A. gave New York a possible way out. The federal agency said it would withdraw its order to build a filtration plant on condition that the city submit a preliminary design for a plant by September. The city would also have to continue with a feasibility study into the far less expensive alternative of ultraviolet treatment.
Both the city and environmental organizations welcomed the E.P.A.'s action. The environmental groups feared that if the city built a filtration plant it would no longer feel pressure to protect the source watersheds.
The E.P.A.'s action re-invigorates implementation of the historic 1997 agreement between the city and the watershed communities that requires the city to spend billions of dollars on land acquisitions and land management programs, among others.
It also reinforces the need for a comprehensive study of the watersheds - their streams and ecosystems. And this is the focus of the Stroud Center's New York monitoring project. A major objective of the Center's project is to study the aquatic ecosystems in the watersheds to provide a basis for relating their condition to land-use and other potential sources of impairment and to develop plans for their remediation and long-term conservation. With the field work just about over for the season, attention now turns to analyzing the thousands of samples taken from the streams and reservoirs from which New York City gets about 1.3 billion gallons of water a day.
The first-year report can be found by clicking here. |
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Stroud Center
wins stewardship award
The Stroud Center has won the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Watershed Stewardship for 2001 - the first year the award has been made.
The award was presented by Gov. Tom Ridge in June at a ceremony in Harrisburg. State Rep. Chris Ross (158th) and Sen. Robert J. Thompson (19th) congratulated the Center for its work.
CONTACT:
www.dep.state.pa.us
Man of many mantles
Stroud Director Bernard Sweeney is serving this year as president of the North American Benthological Society.
 NABS, as it is known to its international membership of 2,000, is a scientific organization devoted to understanding the animals and plants that live on the bottoms of lakes and streams, and the role they play in aquatic ecosystems. The organization was founded in 1953.
Dr. Sweeney's term as president is for one year. In reality, he said, the job lasts for six years - a year each as president-elect and president and four subsequent years as past president, all of which involve serving on working committees and boards. His main goals as president include raising funds to endow the production and distribution costs (both paper and electronic) of the organization's prestigious journal and to initiate a certification program for improving the accuracy of aquatic taxonomy.
CONTACT:
www.benthos.org |
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