State Fracking Rules Could Allow Drilling Near New York City Water Supply Tunnels

If the proposal is adopted in coming months, the state would allow drilling near aqueducts but would require a site-specific environmental review for any application to drill within 1,000 feet of the water supply infrastructure.

That's not enough to protect New York City's water, said Kate Sinding, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is based in the city.

"There needs to be a buffer area in which there's no drilling whatsoever,” Sinding said. "Just having elevated review doesn't cut it.”

City spokesman Farrell Sklerov wouldn't say whether the city's position on the buffer zone had changed, only that officials are updating their recommendations. When the state advanced a similar proposal two years ago, city officials said it could expose tunnels to damage and allow explosive gases and pollutants to leak into the water.

State spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said a separate proposal to prohibit drilling in the New York City watershed was enough to address the city's concerns about threats to the water supply.

John Conrad, a spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York, an industry group, said the guidelines' provision for drilling near infrastructure was adequate to ensure safety. "It seems to be more than would be necessary to be protective,” he said.

At the center of the debate is a system of tunnels constructed in the mid-20th century that carries 1.2 billion gallons of water a day from upstate reservoirs to New York City and nearby counties. The network is already fragile -- tens of millions of gallons of water leak out each day. One repair project is expected to cost more than $1 billion [2].

In comments on a previous draft of the state fracking guidelines [3], the city said brittle rock surrounds many of the tunnels. Drilling nearby could shift the earth, exerting pressure on tunnel walls that they weren't designed to withstand. Natural fractures extend as far as seven miles out and 6,000 feet down through the earth; gases and fluids already have a tendency to migrate through those fractures and toward the aqueducts, according to the city.

These geologic features, together with drilling errors like the ones that have contaminated water wells in Pennsylvania [4], "could result in significant surface and subsurface contamination,” the city wrote.

Though state environmental experts have concluded that gas, natural fluids and fracking fluids -- a mixture of water, sand and chemicals used to crack open the earth -- would not migrate beyond the targeted rock, city environmental officials have argued there isn't enough evidence to prove this couldn't happen. This debate is at the center of the disagreement.

The city and state use a similar 1,000-foot zone to govern the drilling of geothermal wells near the infrastructure. The state has said this policy should apply to gas wells, too, because fracking occurs thousands of feet below the tunnels, which would isolate any effects. The city, however, has expressed concern that the pressure exerted by fracking could alter pre-existing faults and damage the tunnels.

Moreover, city officials have said, there are areas where the Marcellus Shale, the zone of rock the drillers are targeting, is in direct contact with the tunnels. The shale is deeper to the west and south but nears the surface in parts of New York.