Where the Frack is the DEP Water Supply Master Plan Update?
heron doesn’t have a lot of water to wade in. Alexauken Creek, West Amwell (July 11, 2010).
New Fracking Threats – Ed Rodgers of NJN Is Not Here to Cover the Story
In the summertime, riff on Mungo Jerry (listen), you got water on your mind: New Jersey’s chronic drought problems come to mind (see: NJ lurches from drought to floods, but Christie Rollbacks Weaken DEP Management).
Adding to NJ’s chronic water supply deficits, we now have a major new water demand in the Delaware basin, fracking.
Lifting the current DRBC moratorium would open the door to over 18,000 wells in NY and Pennsylvania, according to DRBC. Those wells would use over 100 BILLION gallons of water; generate more than 25 BILLION gallons of toxic hazardous wastewater with unsafe levels of radioactive contaminants; and destroy over 150,000 aces of forests and farms, more than all the land protected by the NJ Highlands Act.
New York state just lifted their moratorium on fracking, so the threats are magnified.
NJ’s highly touted moratorium legislation (Correction: Ban, not moratorium) would have ZERO IMPACT on these threats. As I wrote:
There will be no fracking in NJ, so any legislation banning it or imposing a moratorium in the state of NJ, while well intentioned, is a symbolic hollow gesture.
So, of course we must again ask: when will the many years late and long awaited draft Water Supply Master Plan be released for public comment? (public hearings are not scheduled for July, so maybe DEP will wait until the dog days of August, when Trenton is a ghost town).
In the midst of last year’s drought, and in response to our criticism of this delay, on August 14, 2010DEP told Ed Rodgers of NJN that the Plan would be released in May 2011.
Curious, Ed was practically the only reporter who covered this aspect of the drought, educated the public, and held DEP accountable.
But Ed – and NJN – are no long broadcasting.
No way I see Steve Adubado getting his ass out of his cushy NY Office and down to Trenton to get in DEP’s face on this – which is (pardon the bad pun) way over his head.
Which is just one reason why Governor Christie killed NJN.
Another question: Where the Frack is the State Plan? Christie and company have played a kind shell game with it and made it reappear as the “State Strategic Planning Process Evidently”. This new planning process is tucked securely into Kim Guadagno’s “Business Action Center” unburdened by the quibbling cross-acceptance process. They have decided that they have no use for draft final State Plan produced by decades of effort of numerous state and local planners. Here’s how Kim breaks the news to us: “The current Draft State Plan prepared for re-adoption is considered to be overly complex, leaves unresolved conflicts between various State rules/regulations and fails to prioritize and support sustainable economic growth. In addition, the circumstances and conditions faced by New Jersey at the time the Draft State Plan was developed are very different than what we face today.
see http://www.nj.gov/state/planning/sspp.html#docs