New York City's Water
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Description
New York City’s drinking water comes from surface-water sources located outside the city. Although the city is surrounded by water, that water is not suitable for drinking because it is salty ocean water and brackish river water. The city built its system for importing drinking water, with legal assistance from New York State, starting in the 1830s and continuing into the twentieth century. The city continues to maintain the system, but it has been subject to considerable state and federal regulatory oversight since the latter twentieth century. The city also started building its system for managing wastewater in the mid-nineteenth century. As in other US cities, the introduction of a water-supply system in the nineteenth century facilitated the development of indoor water closets, which increased the need for a systematic approach to removing wastewater. Like many larger older US cities, New York City built a combined wastewater system in the nineteenth century that collects domestic wastewater and excess rainwater into a single system. The city built portions of the oldest of its fourteen wastewater-treatment plants in 1903; the system was significantly enlarged in the 1930s through the 1950s, but the city continued to dump untreated sewage into the Hudson River until 1986. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), acting under the federal Clean Water Act passed in the 1970s, finally forced the city to treat sewage before discharging it into the Hudson River. However, even today, when it rains heavily, the capacity of the city’s sewage system is exceeded, and the city dumps combined overflows of untreated sewage and rainwater into the waters around the city. Partly to comply with the requirements of the federal Clean Water Act, the city has been working for over a decade to install “green infrastructure” on public and private property to absorb rainwater and thus to reduce combined sewage overflow events. The city’s interest in green infrastructure as a means of dealing with stormwater—including the cloudbursts likely to become more frequent as the climate continues to warm—resembles that of other cities discussed in this volume, such as Berlin. This chapter begins with the management of New York City’s water supply and then discusses the management of wastewater and the funding of the water system. It concludes with some observations about the potential of cities as environmental actors, drawing on the lessons from New York City’s management of its water supply and wastewater systems.
Source Publication
Global Sustainable Cities: City Governments and Our Environmental Future
Source Editors/Authors
Danielle Spiegel-Feld, Katrina Miriam Wyman, John J. Coughlin
Publication Date
2023
Recommended Citation
Wyman, Katrina M., "New York City's Water" (2023). Faculty Chapters. 1462.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1462
