Several communites in New York State draw drinking water from the Hudson River. But should the question be how safe is the water? By Eve Ruggeri

42DISCOVER

SurpriSingly, the firSt impurity to conSider in the Hudson is salt, which is easier to avoid altogether than to remove. That’s why the five communities in New York State that draw drinking water regularly from the river—Waterford, Highland Falls, Port Ewen, Rhinebeck, and Poughkeepsie—are all located north of the “salt front”, which floats between West Point and Poughkeepsie. Here the Atlantic Ocean meets the Adirondack springs; the dense, heavy salt water forms a kind of wedge below the sweet water, which can be siphoned off for water treatment. New York City draws on the Hudson only in a drought emergency, but it pipes the water from upstate, and even then, river water may constitute no more than 10 percent of the supply.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., (no relation to the actor) is chief operator of the Poughkeepsie water treatment, which processes 11 to 12 million gallons of water a day. He claims, “People have a misconception of the river. Commu-nities have really buckled down in the last ten or fifteen years and stopped dumping raw sewage into the river. And testing has shown that there are no dangerous chemicals there in any significant quantity. By all the criteria that are available to judge these things, the Hudson is an excellent source [of drinking water].”

But so dismayed was he over the chronic pollution of his beloved Hudson River, which he can see from his home of half a century on a mountaintop in Beacon, he and a group of like-minded friends and neighbors built a boat. It was replica of the 19th century cargo boats that plied the Hudson. Thirty-five years later, treated Hudson River water is clean enough to drink, thanks to the efforts of Clearwater and numerous other guardians of the environment. Not that Seeger has stopped working; he is promoting a plan to create floating pools in the Hudson off the Beacon shore. SAFE FOR DRINKING? But not everybody agrees with Fairbanks; the question lies in how you measure the water’s purity. In the nineteenth cen-tury, civil engineers concerned themselves with bacteria and the spread of infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Now scientists are studying the long-range effects of newer kinds of waste.

Says Cara Lee, environmental director of the civic organization Scientific Hudson, “The federal government doesn’t have water quality standards for a lot of carcinogenic substances. Every year the Hudson receives 200,000 pounds of industrial toxins that are known or suspected to cause cancer in people: lead, cadmium, mercury, PCBs, pesticides, dioxins. The water-treatment plants test for bacteria and pathogenic organisms almost every day; they test for these toxins very infrequently, if at all.” Lee cites studies showing that traces of these chemicals may cause cancer and disorders of the nervous system, and affect fetal development over the long term.

DRINKING WATER REGUALTIONS Susan Shaw, an environmental engi-neer with the Public Water Supply Section of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in New York City, doesn’t deny Lee’s claims. “The EPA can’t regulate every substance in the river. We have standards set for the most common ones,” she explains. “There are always going to be some pollutants where there are industries discharging.”

The same spirit of compromise underlies the EPA’s stand on chlorination. When chlorine atoms bond with naturally occurring acids in the water, they form trihalomethanes (THMs) such as chloroform and bromoform, which are associated with cancer of the intestine, bladder and rectum. “We’d like to see a balance,” states Shaw. “You need enough chlorine to

provide adequate disinfection for waterborne diseases, which are an acute risk to health. A whole town could get gastroen-teritis. But we have to weigh the long-term chronic exposure to disinfection byproducts.”

Apparently the EPA has been experimenting with filtering out natural acids before chlorination and with substituting ozone as a disinfection agent, but the agency claims to lower the levels of THMs, not to eliminate them. Right now the EPA allows up to one hundred micrograms of THMs per liter; some activists are trying to reduce that figure to twenty. How many micrograms per liter in the Poughkeepsie plant? Fairbanks says sixty to sixty-five.

POUGHKEEPSIE’S PROCESS The water is pumped into floculators —enormous, rectangular concrete basins divided into two, each with a million-gallon capacity. The plant supervisor adds a mixture of chemicals that included alum. The chemicals attract the sediment and particles in the water, which include such pollutants as bacteria, viruses, rocks, plant matter, and sewage. The pollutants and chemicals clump together and settle at the bottom of the floculators. Two to four hours later, the water is pumped into the second half of the basin as a pipe feeds in a precise flow of chlorine to kill any remaining microorganisms.

The river water from the basins flows through a filter to remove the tiniest particles which have escaped coagulation. The filter is composed of blocks of perforated tile that hold two or three graduated layers of stone; the stone ranges in size from peas to golf balls, getting coarser toward the bottom. Next, the plant supervisors add fluoride and also treat the water for “cor-rosivity,” by mixing in line, a process that makes the water more alkaline so that it won’t eat into pipes and release toxic metals like lead.

The Hudson River is a defining natural feature of New York State, familiar to millions who drive across its bridges, admire its grandeur from parks and historic sites, or commute to work on the Hudson River Line railroad. But familiar as it may be, the Hudson is more than it seems.

RIvER’S HISTORY Take its name, for example. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for Holland’s East India Company, captained a Dutch ship up this New World river in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. He referred to the river as the “Manhatees,” where we derived the name Manhattan. The Dutch officially named it “River of the Prince Mauritius” as they colonized the valley. Hudson’s name wasn’t applied until 1664, as England tried to legitimize its takeover of the region. The English argued that since the explorer was a subject of England’s king, Hudson’s river belonged to them, not to the Dutch.

“Before the water is piped into homes, it goes through several stages of filters to remove sediments.”

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Others will want to preserve the sense of personal ownership they have cherished for years, at the expense of the public’s right to share. Others aim to see this era of rebirth open the river to as many as possible, without spoiling its best qualities. This generation’s challenge may well be to open from a river that is more alive, in many ways, than it has been in decades.

Of course, native tribes had named the river long before Hudson’s arrival. One of their names—Muhheakantuck—means “great waters in constant motion” or, more loosely, “river that flows two ways.” It highlights the fact that this waterway is more than a river—it is a tidal estuary, an arm of the sea where salty sea water meets fresh water running off the land.

PHYSICAL LANDSCAPE The Hudson estuary stretches 153 miles from Troy to New York Harbor, nearly half the river’s 315 mile course between Lake Tear of the Clouds, its source in the Adirondacks, and the Battery at the tip of Manhattan. The estuary feels the ocean’s tidal pull all the way to Troy. Check back in 20 minutes. Is the water level the same? The estuary usually has two high and two low tides in twenty-four hours. With this rising and falling come changes in the direction of flow. Generally speak-ing, a rising tide is accompanied by a flood current flowing north towards Troy, and a falling tide by an ebb current flowing south towards the ocean.

Salty sea water also pushes up the estuary, diluted by freshwater runoff as it moves north. In years with average amounts of precipitation falling in typical seasonal patterns, the spring runoff holds the leading edge of dilute sea water —the salt front—downriver between the Tappan Zee and Yonkers. As runoff slackens in summer, the salt front pushes northward to Newburgh Bay, and further—to Poughkeepsie—in droughts.

Estuaries are among the most productive of earth’s ecosystems. Hudson and Dutch traders wrote of a river teeming with striped bass, herring, and giant sturgeon. More than 200 species of fish are found in

the Hudson and its tributaries. The estuary’s productivity is ecologically and economically valuable to much of the Atlantic Coast; key commercial and recreational species like striped bass, bluefish, and blue crab depend on nursery habitat here. Bald eagles, herons, waterfowl, and other birds feed from the river’s bounty. Tidal marshes, mudflats, and other significant habitats in and along the estuary support a great diversity of life, including endangered species like the shortnose sturgeon and peregrine falcon.

OUR SOCIETY’S IMPACT The region’s human inhabitants have flourished thanks to the Hudson estuary. Its course through the Hudson Highlands, the only sea-level breach in the Appalachian Mountain Range, allowed nineteenth century engineers to realize their visions of links between the seacoasts and heartlands. A key leg in the transport of goods between New York Harbor and the Great Lakes via the Erie Canal, the river helped make New York the Empire State. The Hudson River eventually became a source of drinking water to cities, process water to industry, fun and games to picnickers and boaters, and soul-stirring inspiration to artists.

However, as population increased, the Hudson’s natural resources were abused. Discharges of raw sewage led to high bacteria counts and low oxygen levels. Dismayed at such abuse, citizens took action. In the late nineteenth century, New York and New Jersey residents combined to mount a preservation effort that saved the Palisades clif fs. New York voters passed a bond act for sewage cleanup in 1965; the federal Clean Water Act was enacted in 1972. These measures significantly improved water quality in the Hudson estuary.

Today the Hudson River is one of the healthiest estuaries on the Atlantic Coast. Its striking environmental recovery have made it one of the nation’s fourteen American Heritage Rivers. Many citizen groups and government agencies work actively to restore and also protect the estuary’s natural resources, as well as promoting it as a tourist and vacation hot spot.

And then you have drinkable water. Or do you?

“New York voters passed a bond act for sewage cleanup in 1965 … These measures significantly improved water quality in the Hudson estuary.”

The contaminants found in Hudson River water can have adverse effects on the human body. Some of these health consequences include:

CANCER ORGAN DAMAGE NERvOUS SYSTEM DAMAGE