HANCOCK, NY — Water spilling from reservoirs in the year behind, the potential for flooding in the year ahead—the specter of water, past and future, hung over a meeting at the Hancock Town Hall on April 12. 

Representatives from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) updated attendees on the status of a project to repair the Delaware Aqueduct, a tunnel bringing 600 million gallons a day of water from the Upper Delaware to New York City. DEP’s modeling and preparation work should allow the project to be completed without impacting the city or the Delaware River tailwaters, representatives said. 

Why are people concerned?

The Delaware Aqueduct repair project will shut down a portion of the tunnel that connects the Upper Delaware reservoirs to the rest of New York City’s water system. 

That shutdown means the 600 million gallons per day that usually get diverted from the Upper Delaware and sent to the city will instead pool in the Upper Delaware reservoirs: Pepacton, Neversink, Cannonsville and Rondout. It also means that the DEP has fewer tools to safely empty those reservoirs if they start to overflow. 

“I’m just scared… I think that flood mitigation should be a priority when you’re shutting it down and there’s no diversion, because Pepacton is always the last to get diversions after a major flood,” said Joan Homovich, a local resident who attended the meeting.

Those in attendance asked the DEP for guarantees and for certainty about the project’s flood mitigation plans. The DEP will be watching the situation and making higher releases to keep the risk of flooding down, said Jen Garigliano, chief of staff for the DEP Bureau of Water. But she could not say at that moment what the specific numbers would be for those releases. “I don’t have a crystal ball.” 

“That’s what we’re looking for,” responded Homovich. 

Why is it complicated?

The DEP has authority over the Delaware Aqueduct project, but it is not alone in that project’s oversight and planning. 

“We’re talking with the National Weather Service, the Albany office, the Binghamton office. the New York City office,” said Garigliano. “We are talking with the North Atlantic River Forecasting Center, the Mid-Atlantic River Forecasting Center, [we’re] talking with the Delaware River Basin Commission, we’re talking with the DEC—all of these people are helping us with decisions.”

The range of advisors the DEP can consult means that their models and their forecasting could be top-of-the-line. It also means those models are complicated, and can’t be boiled down to a single set of numbers, according to the DEP. 

Multiple governments have a say in the Delaware River, as multiple states—New York, PA, New Jersey and Delaware—rely on the river for their water. The states have abided by a 1954 Supreme Court decree in their shared management of the river’s waters. 

The five parties to the decree—the four states plus New York City—use the Flexible Flow Management Plan (FFMP) to govern their use of the river. The FFMP regulates the releases that can be made from the Upper Delaware reservoirs, to meet water supply demands, protect fisheries, enhance flood mitigation and keep salt out of downriver water supplies. 

Advocates in the Upper Delaware have requested that the DEP request an exemption from the FFMP, to have a freer hand in making releases for flood mitigation. They referenced the FFMP during the April 12 meeting as well. 

The DEP did not indicate that it would request such an exemption. 

What comes next?

The shutdown of the Delaware Aqueduct will start in October, but releases in preparation for that shutdown will start much earlier in the year. The DEP will start to release water from the Delaware reservoirs in June, looking to get them emptier than usual in time for the October shutdown. 

After the tunnel is drained, the repair work that needs be done will start in November and last approximately five to eight months. If work isn’t done by May [2024], the project team will bring the Delaware Aqueduct back online, and resume work after the summer, said Garigliano; the return to service will take between one and nine weeks, and can happen in the middle of the project if the weather forecasts look bad. 

The DEP plans to continue outreach about the project. Residents of the area asked specifically for communication around changes in releases, especially for those who work on the river. 

“Is there a way that we could get more than 15-minutes-after-it-happened notification of when these changes are going to happen… because those of us that work in the river with our feet on the bottom would like to know when the water levels are going to change, because it’s kind of an important safety concern,” said Hancock attorney Brett Lorenzen, proprietor of Riverfly Enterprises, LLC.