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AGENCY TESTIMONY
Water quality and Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD)
0:11:13
ยท
90 sec
Commissioner Aggarwala discusses DEP's efforts to maintain high water quality and the importance of the Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD) for the city's water supply system.
- DEP conducts extensive water quality monitoring, including over 650,000 analyses on 46,000 samples annually.
- The FAD, which allows NYC to avoid building a filtration plant for 90% of its water supply, is up for renewal in 2027.
- Climate change, evolving regulations, and wildlife resurgence pose new challenges to water quality management.
- DEP has shifted its land acquisition strategy to focus on areas adjacent to reservoirs rather than distant watershed lands.
Rohit Aggarwala
0:11:13
DEP's highest priority is to provide high quality drinking water to half of New York State, including not only the entire city but also roughly a million and a half were residents of Westchester, Putnam and Orange Counties.
0:11:25
We recently published our annual drinking water supply and quality report which among other things reports on the result of our more than 650,000 analyses our scientists performed on more than 46,000 samples taken from our watershed, our reservoirs, and our distribution system.
0:11:45
In addition, 2,900,000 robotic monitoring measurements were taken from the Upstate Reservoirs.
0:11:53
We keep a very close eye on water quality.
0:11:55
As I testified here last year, a key to our water quality is the filtration avoidance determination, the FAD, that governs watershed protections and allows us to avoid the cost of building and operating a filtration plant for the 90% of our water that comes from the West Of Hudson Watershed.
0:12:12
As I mentioned then, the FAD is up for renewal in 2027 and we believe it will need to evolve significantly in order to continue to be successful because climate change, evolving regulations, and a resurgence of wildlife are posing new threats that cannot be addressed with old solutions.
0:12:30
On that basis, DEP this year announced the end of its program to purchase land far from the reservoirs in order to focus our land acquisition efforts on important and more expensive land adjacent to our reservoirs.