NARROWSBURG, NY — The shutdown of the Delaware Aqueduct won’t happen until October, but its effects will be felt as early as next month. 

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is conducting a decades-long project to repair leaks in the Delaware Aqueduct, the tunnel system that takes water from the Upper Delaware and uses it to supply New York City with drinking water. That project requires the DEP to shut down the Delaware Aqueduct for a period of five to eight months, a shutdown intended to start this October. 

Jennifer Garigliano, director for water resources management with the DEP’s Bureau of Water Supply, gave a presentation about the shutdown at the May 4 meeting of the Upper Delaware Council (UDC). The appearance was one of a series Garigliano is making in anticipation of the shutdown. 

New to the conversation this time were concerns from canoe liveries and river guides about their ability to operate over the summer. 

“We don’t have a lot of buffer room as far as what we can legally operate within for our liveries,” said Daniel Corrigan with Northeast Wilderness Experience.

The issue stems from the measures the DEP needs to take to prepare for the shutdown. Normally, the Delaware Aqueduct takes around 600 million gallons of water a day from the Upper Delaware to New York City. During the shutdown, that number will drop to zero, increasing the risk of flooding as water builds up in the reservoirs at the river’s tailwaters. 

To manage the build-up, the DEP will release more water than usual from the reservoirs down the Delaware River. Starting in June, the DEP will keep releases high and draw down the reservoirs to have them approximately 70 percent full before the October shutdown. 

A summer of higher-than-usual releases could affect those who work on the river. With full releases, the river will be approximately 4.2-to-five-feet high at the Barryville gage, said Corrigan. The canoe liveries can’t have open-cockpit boats out on the river if the level is above six feet; a full-release river height doesn’t give the liveries a lot of room to work with, and that room can easily be erased by a rain event, he said. 

The DEP just learned about that issue at the start of the week, and will be taking it into consideration, said Garigliano.

Flood preparations

Diane Tharp, executive director of the North Delaware River Watershed Conservancy, brought the conversation back to the issue of flooding. 

Tharp would like the DEP to confirm “from day one of the closure, you are going to be proactive and aggressive enough in the release schedule to maintain those voids in the first at least five months of this closure… because otherwise, I really am very concerned about what could actually happen.”

“We are being proactive, and that’s why the drawdown is starting in June,” said Garigliano.

Garigliano added that the team was ready to make aggressive decisions if it needed to. 

The full presentation will be available at youtube.com/@upperdelawarecouncil8106. Garligiano told the UDC she would come back closer to the projected shutdown date to provide updates. 

In other news…

Later in the meeting, regional agencies provided the UDC with updates on local projects. 

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) planned to hold its second-quarter public hearing on Wednesday, May 10. The FIMFO project, a $40-plus million improvement to the Kittatinny Canoes location in Barryville, will not be on the agenda; it’s still going through the DRBC’s internal review process. 

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) updated the UDC on the progress of the river-access point at Highland. 

It fell on the DEC to finish the project, which was “kind of unexpected,” said representative Ryan Coulter. The DEC will get the contracts out to bid, and only then will it have an estimate for when the site will open.