Water can influence and even drive the Hudson Valley economy in ways the region would be wise to explore.
That is the message from the latest regional report issued by the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) at SUNY New Paltz, which earlier this month released a paper on Hudson Valley water resources.
“The Hudson Valley could be called the Saudi Arabia of water,” reads the report, released Oct. 8. “We are very rich in a resource that is scarce and expensive in much of the rest of the world.”
“With failing aquifers in China, droughts in Russia and legal water battles across our own southern and western states, we should be optimizing water advantages right here at home,” said Russell Urban-Mead, one of the authors of the report, titled, “Hudson Valley Water: Opportunities and Challenges.” Â It is co-authored by Scott Cuppett.
“We have lots of rain, a river that brings us water from a 12,000-square-mile watershed, and climate models that predict only more rainfall in the future,” Urban-Mead said.
The report compares the region”™s water riches as an economic advantage on par with a well-trained and educated work force, but says the Balkanization of responsibility for the resource must not be allowed to squander it.
Responsibility for the watershed is spread throughout dozens of municipalities and agencies, ranging from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the state Department of Environmental Conservation to local water departments and planning boards.
“The urgent need for pioneering regional water resource planning and protection in the Hudson Valley cannot be overstated,” states the report.
The report recommends conservation efforts and watershed preservation work in concert with encouraging economic growth. It calls for assessing locales where water is most easily obtainable, so-called “water ready” sites, and urges coordinated efforts to ensure groundwater aquifers are being recharged as well as safeguarded from contamination.
The report notes the region receives between 38 to 44 inches of precipitation annually, compared with 15 inches or less in some western states. The Hudson River has a 12,000-square-mile watershed above Poughkeepsie, while the salt front from the Atlantic Ocean reaches around West Point and Newburgh. Thus, the report calls the Mid-Hudson region, “the effective outlet of the freshwater Hudson River” with “an extraordinary volume” of 9.3 million gallons per minute. By comparison, the city of Poughkeepsie drew about 10 million gallons daily from the river.
The report notes the Hudson Valley region “lies in one of the few parts” of the country where climate change models predict an increase in precipitation in coming years, but warns climate science is still evolving. So it calls for a cautious and comprehensive approach to managing the resource, saying that proactive data-gathering, planning and infrastructure be prepared and constructed starting now. “We must assure that we use our good fortune wisely” said the report so that, “when requests for access to our water resources reaches our doorstep” the region is ready to respond.
“Our abundance of water in the Hudson Valley provides one of our greatest regional opportunities, and one of our biggest challenges,” said Gerald Benjamin, CRREO director.
