The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has been a busy bee lately. On Friday, it announced that it is opening 6,600 acres of city-owned land for recreational use, and on Saturday, Adam Bosch at the Times Herald-Record wrote an article about the department's plan to plug the leaks in the Delaware Aqueduct using lots and lots of lime.
According to a press release, the DEP is converting 5,800 acres of its land into public access zones, where anyone can hunt, fish, hike or trap without a permit. (The rest of the acreage mentioned in the article requires a free permit to access.)
This latest move brings
the total number of acres of New York City-owned water supply land and reservoirs open for recreation to 108,000—more than double the amount available in 2003.
As for the DEP's aqueduct plans, Bosch explaines that the DEP is going to spend $4 million to test a new approach to fixing the reservoirs leaks:
Engineers believe they can stop the leaks by supersaturating water from the Rondout Reservoir with lime. Supersaturating is a simple idea: Think of it as loading a glass of water with too much iced tea mix, causing the extra powder to settle on the bottom of the glass. If city workers can load the reservoir water with too much lime, they think the extra will stick along the sides of the tunnel and plug cracks that have flooded homes in Wawarsing and created man-made springs in Newburgh.
This seems to be a shift in the DEP's leak-fixing plans. Last fall, when the DEP announced that it would be spending $2 billion to re-route the aqueduct and fix the leaks, the plan was to fix the leaks by "grouting" them -- injecting high-pressure cement into the cracks themselves. This new plan is undoubtedly cheaper -- if it works.
But is "supersaturating" water that is bound for NYC taps with lime a good idea? According to Wikipedia, one form of lime, calcium hydroxide, has a "low toxicity" and is already used extensively in water treatment systems. (It's also used in root canals and to preserve vegetables, so we're probably injesting quite a bit of it already.)
