On the Water Front

On a raw winter’s day, the water riffling over the spillway of the Ashokan Reservoir looks icy and pure. Set at the eastern end of this vast artificial lake in Ulster County, the spillway curves and drops like a wedding cake, in four tiers, before sending its flow through a narrow granite passage flanked by evergreens. The setting is grand, as befits an enormous public work, a manipulation of nature for the benefit of humanity — or at least for the 8.2 million residents of New York City, 100 miles to the south.

If the Ashokan is not the one true source of the city’s drinking water, akin to Perrier’s Vergèze or the original Poland Spring, it is still evocative shorthand for the sprawling upstate waterworks that have long quenched New York’s thirst. The city has the largest drinking-water system in the country, an engineering feat on a par with the Panama Canal, delivering 1.2 billion gallons of water a day through 300 miles of tunnels and aqueducts and 6,000 miles of distribution mains.

Moreover, as city officials, water connoisseurs and native boosters have long declared, New York tap water is among the world’s purest and tastiest. It is praised in foreign-language guidebooks, and some city bakers credit its mineral content and taste for their culinary success.

“It’s delicious,” said Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The upstate water is of such good quality, in fact, that the city is not even required to filter it, a distinction shared with only four other major American cities: Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore. New Yorkers drink their water from Esopus Creek, from Schoharie Creek, from the Neversink River, straight from the city’s many reservoirs, with only a rough screening and, for most of the year, just a shot of chlorine and chasers of fluoride, orthophosphate and sodium hydroxide.

from the NY Times