While New York City's water is unfiltered, it does get treated with chlorine to kill germs, fluoride to prevent cavities, orthophosphate to hinder lead contamination from pipes, and salt hydroxide to decrease acidity. In Key Reference for drinking water to remain unfiltered and earn a Filtration Avoidance Decision (TREND), the U.S. Epa (EPA) needs that a water system not be the source of a waterborne disease, not go beyond set limits for coliform germs (indications of fecal contamination and sewage) and turbidity (murkiness caused by suspended solids), and curb levels for trihalomethane (a chemical utilized in solvents and refrigerants) and disinfectant residues.
To guarantee that New York City water fulfills these requirements, the DEP carries out over 900 day-to-day and 330,000 yearly tests on drinking water throughout the city, along with 230,000 tests in the watershed. Given that the early 1990s, NYC has actually been given FADs, enabling water from the Catskill/Delaware system to stay unfiltered.
5 billion UV disinfection facility, which will be the world's biggest when it opens in 2012, is currently under building in Mt. Pleasant, NY. NYC has actually been effective in acquiring Trends largely due to the landmark 1997 Watershed Memorandum of Arrangement (MOA) worked out by New York City and New york city State companies, the EPA, upstate neighborhoods and ecological groups.
It attends to land acquisition, making it possible for NYC to purchase up environmentally sensitive watershed lands from ready sellers and keep them from being established. And it established collaboration programs with regional watershed communities to fund septic system upgrades, repair work facilities, and handle agriculture-related and other contamination. The need to filter water from the Croton system was discussed as far back as 1908, but at the time, chlorination was selected as the finest approach to the water quality problems.
Compared to the other two watersheds, the Croton tanks include more natural organic matter, such as algae, connected with eutrophication, and iron from bottom sediments; at times, these impact the water's color, smell and taste. Furthermore, the Croton watershed is much more populated and developed than the Catskill/Delaware watershed, resulting in more paved surface areas and increased stormwater runoff and pollution.