Excessive nutrients blamed for algae bloom in October 2015
NEW PALTZ – A five-year study of the Wallkill River conducted by Riverkeeper found you don’t necessarily want to take a dip in the water.
Riverkeeper Water Quality Program Director Dan Shapley said the vast
majority of the 685 water samples taken from the Wallkill watershed failed
to get good grades in terms of sewage and fecal contamination.
“The picture is not too pretty,” Shapley said. “Eighty-seven percent of the samples that we have taken have failed to meet federal guidelines for safe swimming and if you look at average contamination, it’s about 10 times what would be considered safe swimming threshold by the EPA.”
Former New Paltz Village Mayor Jason West, the executive director of
the Watershed Alliance, said the next step is to seek funding to study
potential remedial actions.
“There are ongoing sources to a lot of these contaminants and you can deal with the ongoing sources – runoff from farms, stormwater from villages and cities, wastewater treatment plants, leaking septic systems – all of these contribute to a deteriorated river and there are things we can do about each of these,” West said. “We may not be able to do anything about old DDT that is locked in the sentiment down in the bottom of the river but we can stop new pesticides from being dumped into the water.”
On Tuesday, March 28 from 5 to 8 p.m., a Wallkill River Summit will be held at SUNY New Paltz to continue discussions about the health of the river.
