NY Times: =UDR Article=

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: April 6, 2005

Milford, Pa.

RUTH JONES was born on the river in 1932, growing up in what is now the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, and still canoes 300 to 400 miles a year. In 1941, her family started the first canoe company on the Delaware River, Kittatinny Canoes, and still runs it. She's seen it ebb and flood forever and vividly remembers the 1955 flood that until last fall was the gold standard of the river on a rampage. She knows you can no more control the river than the wind.

And yet.

As she looks across the swollen brown river toward North Jersey, this morning still at least twice its normal width, she can't help but wonder how there were two floods, in less than a year, that were the first to rival the flood of 50 years ago. And she's raising an issue you can hear up and down the river this week: Along with an act of God, was this week's flooding also, in any way, a failing of man?

After all, she said, the Aug. 18, 1955, flood had been the result of two back-to-back hurricanes, Connie and Diane. At one point, 8.5 inches of rain poured into a swollen river in 12 hours. Neither Hurricane Ivan in September nor the rainfall of the past week approached that.

So the question she and others are asking is, if nature didn't deal us a historic blow twice in the past year, why did we have historic flooding twice in the past year?

There's no simple answer, but upriver, that question often leads to a discussion that's been going on since at least 1996, about the role of the giant reservoirs on the Delaware. They are part of New York City's reservoir systems and can store 580 billion gallons of water.

"I'm not saying the flooding could have been eliminated, but I think it could have been minimized," Mrs. Jones said. "The storm was completely predicted. The reservoirs were full. If they had released water in advance, it would have made a big difference."

If the politics of water takes many forms, this is perhaps the most elemental one. The biggest player on the Delaware is New York City's Department of Environmental Protection, which manages its reservoirs with one paramount goal - providing enough drinking water for 9 million people.

So, particularly after droughts in eight of the 23 years from 1980 through 2002, the department has relentlessly focused on a single goal, making sure that its reservoirs are full each June 1. That is when the spring rains and snow melt are supposed to have filled them for the summer.

BUT increasingly, other agendas intrude.

People upriver have an enormous stake in how the river is managed, said Bill Douglass, executive director of the Upper Delaware Council, a nonprofit group that monitors the river. Their concerns range from water temperatures for trout fishing to managing the river with an eye to flooding.

And he's among those who would like to see the city expand on an initiative it agreed to in January providing for a series of controlled releases from its Pepacton Reservoir in Delaware County, N.Y., one of three primary ones on the Delaware, with the goal of managing its runoff to try to minimize flooding.

"They own and operate those reservoirs and their sole goal is to provide clean water to New York City," he said. "But there are many people who believe that the reservoirs could and perhaps should operate in a way that could limit the possibility of flooding during certain times of the year."

Michael A. Principe, a deputy environmental protection commissioner, said there's very little the city can do. Its reservoirs are built for water storage, not for flood control, so they're totally unsuited to being used regularly as water management tools, he said. To have a measurable impact on water in the river takes weeks of releases, not the few days weather forecasting provides guidance for.

"You run the risk of drawing down the reservoir and not being able to refill it," he said. "The first day of the drought can be the one right after the storm."

Still, it's seldom possible to completely divorce floods from human activity, like the new subdivisions and Wal-Marts and strip malls and parking lots, replicating in the hills where trees and dirt once captured water before it got to the river.

And Mrs. Jones, as stunned by the damage from this one as she was by the one in 1955 that destroyed her parents' home, said one thing never changes. "People have to respect the river," she said. "It's the boss."

[end article]