The Wanaque Reservoir is clean. But for how long?

Sunday, August 24, 2003


BY TED SHERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff


Squeezed by growing development, and fed by rivers too dirty to swim in, the water supply for 2 million people in New Jersey is coming under increasing pressure.

Higher concentrations of contaminants such as fecal coliform, chloride and sodium are being found in the rivers of the Passaic Basin, according to a new assessment conducted for the state Department of Environmental Protection. The watershed serves more than a quarter of the state's population.

At the same time, stormwater runoff and treated wastewater from dozens of sewage plants are adding high levels of phosphorus and nitrates to those rivers, which are pumped directly into the Wanaque Reservoir, the largest in the state.

The contaminants have not made anyone ill. The reservoir water is treated and filtered. Water- quality data obtained separately under the state Open Public Records Act, and an independent analysis conducted for The Star- Ledger, show water quality from the Wanaque continues to meet all federal and state standards.

Environmentalists and state officials say, however, the system is on a tightrope:

* Blue-green algae often fill the Wanaque Reservoir in the summer. The natural water supply to the reservoir is augmented by water pumped from other rivers that carries large quantities of treated effluent, the liquid waste discharged by sewage treatment plants, feeding the growth of algae.


* More houses are being built on the wooded, steep slopes surrounding the big reservoir, spiking the drinking-water supply with runoff from their lawns and septic systems, plus road salt.


* Recurring droughts -- including the one that left the state parched only last year -- take a toll on water quality. When river water is pumped into the reservoir to supplement the supply, the levels of potentially harmful chlorine byproducts rise.



New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bradley Campbell says the waters that naturally feed the Wanaque are not getting adequate protection. In addition, he says, there have been excessive delays in reducing amount of phosphorus and nitrates in the pumped-in water critical to the needs of the region.

"So much of the drinking water intake is wastewater effluent," said Campbell. "I don't think the public is aware of how much the Passaic watershed is a 'closed loop' system, and how much that makes safeguards that much more important."

While the state says drinking- water quality after treatment is unimpaired, officials are especially concerned over how much phosphorus is being discharged from sewage plants, and are moving to set strict limits.

At the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, which is responsible for the Wanaque watershed and conducted the environmental assessment for the state, officials say the water delivered out of the reservoir is pure. Michael Restaino, the executive director of the commission, said the reservoir acts as a natural cleaning process.

"There is nothing better than a surface-water reservoir," said Restaino, whose agency provides water to people in 90 communities.

Treating water is not much more complicated than pouring a glass of water, letting it stand around a while, and then filtering it. At the commission's treatment plant in Wanaque, water is pumped through outdoor settling basins. Chemicals added to the "raw" water cause particles suspended in the liquid to coagulate and settle out, before the water is filtered through layers of anthracite, sand and gravel, and finally chlorinated to kill bacteria.

The Wanaque Reservoir, created in 1930 by the damming of the Wanaque River, is fed by the rivers and small streams trickling down the glacier-carved valleys that contain it. Its water was once so clean that it was delivered to the tap unfiltered. That changed in the 1980s, when it was decided to greatly expand the reservoir by pumping in water from the Pompton and Passaic rivers.

The reservoir had already been drawing in part on the Ramapo River in an expansion completed in 1953. Massive pumps were installed in 1983 to divert water from Two Bridges, where the Pompton and Passaic rivers meet, and a filtration plant was built at the reservoir to treat the water.

The Two Bridges facility, which is so powerful that it can reverse the flow of the Passaic River, can pump up to 250 million gallons of water a day. During the last drought, the Wanaque may well have gone dry without the river water.

Such supplements will be relied upon increasingly as population and water demand increase.

However, that water comes at a cost: It carries millions of gallons of waste flow from 41 upstream wastewater treatment plants that discharge into the rivers of the Wanaque watershed.


THE BIOLOGICAL MACHINE
While there has been a dramatic improvement in the quality of the water in the Passaic River and its tributaries, the new watershed assessment report called much of the Ramapo and Pompton rivers "effluent-dominated" -- meaning a fair amount of both rivers comes from sewage wastewater.



In fact, the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission's pumping station at Two Bridges is a literal stone's throw downstream of the outflow pipe of the Two Bridges Sewerage Authority's wastewater treatment plant in Lincoln Park, a facility that treats sewage from 44,000 people in 11 towns.

The wastewater plant there is literally a biological machine, using bacteria to eat the waste matter. Settling tanks remove the resulting sludge, and the leftover effluent is chlorinated before it is filtered and released in an eight-hour cycle -- as much as 7.5 million gallons a day.

The treated water goes into the Pompton, just upstream of the Wanaque Reservoir pumping station. Under the federal and state permits that allow Two Bridges to operate, the water must be clean enough to keep a colony of fathead minnows alive for 36 hours -- a lab test conducted twice a year.

Even so, what gets discharged is not exactly drinkable. Wastewater treatment plants put out high levels of both phosphates and nitrates -- nutrients that feed the growth of algae -- and Two Bridges has come under criticism especially for the nitrate levels it adds to the Pompton River.

"We're not designed to take out nitrates, but we've tried to pitch in and help," said executive director Robert Bongiovanni.

In an effort to reduce the nitrate levels, the authority experimented last year with its aeration tanks, huge mixers that churn the chocolate-colored water and add air to the mixture. In the trial, the authority tried cycling the mixers on and off. That brought the nitrate levels down -- but it also burned up three breakers, a gearbox and three variable-frequency drives, at a cost of $80,000.

Bongiovanni is not convinced that phosphorus levels in the river are due solely to his wastewater treatment plant. In fact, he has seen algae blooms in the Pompton River upstream of the plant. "We can't get out appreciable amount of phosphorus and make a difference," he said.

Nevertheless, Campbell has already put all sewerage plants in the state on notice that the phosphorus limits in their permits, which have never been enforced, will soon be challenged.


WHERE THE TROUT ARE
North Jersey District Water Supply Commission officials say the bulk of their water still comes from the natural rural watershed. Water from other rivers is pumped in only to supplement the reservoir system.



Still, the sources naturally feeding the Wanaque are being severely affected by local development within the once-rural watershed lands, say local environmentalists and state officials.

The effects of that development can be seen in the waters that feed the reservoir, such as the West Brook, a wild stream that plunges down hills, through wetlands and a dark wooded hemlock tract until it tumbles over Miller's Falls and into the Wanaque Reservoir.

It is one of the last places in New Jersey where all three species of native trout still thrive. The pristine scene, though, is startlingly deceptive. A few steps from the banks of the brook, houses can be seen through the woods. Farther down, amid rotting leaves in the mossy depressions of a forested wetland area, are a child's beach ball and a discarded plastic sports drink bottle, both tossed from the road above.

Upstream, atop the steep, trap rock slopes carved over time by the water, yellow bulldozers are scraping out lots for a luxury housing development.

"The minute we have a rainstorm, the mountains flush out and all of a sudden we have dirty water," complained Bud Korteweg, president of the Windbeam Club, a fishing club founded in 1931 that owns 80 acres of land up and down the West Brook. "They are building right on trout-designated streams."

Officials of the towns surrounding the Wanaque Reservoir have been very welcoming to developers in recent years, said Joanne Atlas, an environmental activist from Ringwood. "They have not been serious about protecting the land," she said.

In 1996, zoning rules in Ringwood, which surrounds the northern end of the Wanaque Reservoir, were changed to allow the construction of houses on steep slopes on much smaller tracts of land than had been previously allowed. It led to the construction of a luxury development called Kensington Wood on the side of a mountain overlooking the Ramapo River.

Roy Taylor Jr. and his wife bought one of those houses, nestled spectacularly on the sheer hills near the Wanaque Reservoir. To reach their house, visitors have to navigate a series of switchbacks carved into the hill. His back yard is Ringwood State Park.

"We like it up here. It's so nice and quiet," said Taylor, a Texas transplant who showed off the three-bedroom brick contemporary. "But they never should have built houses up here."

His expensive house has a failed septic system that has been infiltrated by the mountain springs that run off the hills to the Ramapo below. The Ramapo River is also pumped into the Wanaque Reservoir.

The septic field at the back of his house is a raised hill, not unlike some ancient burial mound. He has an engineer's report that documents the failings in the system.

"See this water," Taylor points at a ditch of soft dirt around the mound. "It stays this way all the time."

He is suing the builder.

Robin O'Hearn, the executive director of Skylands Clean, an environmental advocacy group, said there is too much development going up on similar slopes, and complained that the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission does little to intervene.

"Their track record is not stellar in terms of protecting streams," she said. "When the development goes forward, they don't seem to come forward and challenge it. We've tried to involve them."

Restaino snaps angrily at the criticism.

"We already have our buffer zone. It's been there for years and years," he said. "They want to buy up properties all over here, but it's a waste of money."

Yet Campbell, too, raises questions about the authority's level of involvement in preservation and acquisition.

"We'd like to see them more active in that area," the state environmental commissioner said.

Despite their stance on the need for buffer zones, North Jersey District Water Supply Commission officials concede they have reservations about some of the steep slope property development. In particular, they point to one being built on a hilltop skirted by the West Brook known as West Brook Hills.

Its developer, Jack Levkovitz, who has been building in the area for more than 30 years, acknowledges the controversy the development has caused, but said he was mindful of the environment and has met all zoning requirements.

"Should I make a statement that by building here, the ecology isn't touched? It is," he said. "But people live in houses, and their children will grow up and want to live in houses."


BLUE WATER
Despite the growing changes in the reservoir, state environmental records show that North Jersey is generally in compliance with state and federal clean water standards, with no significant water quality problems. Last year the commission was cited only for its failure to collect water samples every four hours, as a result of technical problems in the treatment plant.



Officials also pointed out that the reservoir changes are cyclical. This year, there has been little, if any, pumping of river water, and the Wanaque Reservoir remains blue.

Still, the droughts of recent years have had an impact on water quality out of the Wanaque, requiring added levels of chlorine to kill the bacteria.

Chlorine is a devil's bargain to a water supplier. It kills the pathogens that make people ill or worse, but it also reacts to decaying plant material and other organic substances in the water such as fertilizer -- creating a byproduct known as trihalomethanes. It's not a happy mixture. Trihalomethanes are a known carcinogen and also have been linked to miscarriages. More than two dozen women have filed a class-action suit in Chesapeake, Va., claiming the city did not adequately warn them about potentially harmful trihalomethane levels in their water.

North Jersey has had no major violations in the past few years, although its trihalomethane levels regularly go up during drought years. An examination by The Star- Ledger of quarterly water-quality reports that the commission files with the state found that, like with many water suppliers, North Jersey's trihalomethane levels regularly spike well above the average readings used for regulatory compliance.

On average, the commission's trihalomethane levels remain well below 80 parts per billion, the current federal limit, but its compliance reports show spikes near 100 parts per billion.

Michael Barnes, the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission's assistant director for engineering and technical services, agreed there has been a slight trend upward in trihalomethane levels and said the commission is working on solutions. The commission is examining modifications to the filtration system that would reduce the time that chlorine is in contact with the water before it is filtered.

The commission noted that trihalomethane levels are usually higher during warm-weather months and taper off during colder months, and also stressed that the quarterly levels are all within acceptable ranges.

An independent analysis of the water in the Wanaque system, conducted by the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, a research center operated by Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, found no problems with the water -- either in the watershed or after treatment. Brian Buckley, director of laboratories and facilities for the institute, said the water was free of contaminants. The only metals they found were trace levels of barium, non-radioactive strontium and magnesium.

For its part, the state is starting to take steps to expand safeguards against encroaching development around reservoirs like the Wanaque. Under new rules, more streams and reservoirs will receive "Category One" protection, which means there can be no further degradation of the water quality by piped-in wastewater or storm runoff.

The West Brook, though, is already on the edge, said Ross Kushner, executive director of the nonprofit Pequannock River Coalition.

Referring to the temperatures that will kill trout, Kushner said, "In some cases you are dancing on the thermal limit."

The stormwater coming off the roads and development is coming into the stream without any treatment, he said, and the quarry is causing high silt levels.

All of it ends up in the Wanaque Reservoir.

"When your drinking supply is the reservoir and the trout are suddenly dying, what does that tell you about that water supply?" Kushner wondered.