Where'd the water go? A creek in Webster runs dry
To their dismay, Sandy and John Baldwin looked out their back window one morning and saw their duck pond was losing water.
The stream that feeds it had run dry.
This was a little more than a year ago. For much of this summer and fall, the half-acre pond was largely drained, fetid with rotting vegetation. The stream that nurtured their pond, an unnamed tributary of Fourmile Creek in Webster, was bone-dry.
"We've lived here 13 1/2 years," said Sandy Baldwin. "It was a beautiful pond. Friends came over and fished in it. We had a paddleboat.
“Six hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water a day went through there. That’s enough to fill three swimming pools. Where’d all that water go?”
The answer is complex, and possibly ironic. The Baldwins and their allies believe construction of the $150 million Monroe County Water Authority treatment plant just up the road disrupted vital wetlands that fed the creek. A hydrology professor backs up this argument.
But the authority disputes it. Federal and New York state regulators back them up. They say the stream's drying-up could be a natural occurrence. Or maybe something else is at work.
"It is a mystery. I’ll say that," said Ronald Nesbitt, town supervisor in Webster, whose richly landscaped arboretum is bisected by the stream. It feeds a pond there and a small decorative waterfall that was, for a good part of this summer, dry as a bone.
"Are we concerned about the arboretum? Yes, we are. But we don’t have an answer," the supervisor said. "We're stymied."
No matter the explanation or who's to blame, the Baldwins and others who share their frustrations want the flow to be restored. They have urged the authority, which discards a great deal of waste water daily, to funnel some of it into the stream bed.
That couldn't come too soon for Colm Murphy, owner of Webster Golf Club, which has used the stream and connected ponds for irrigation for a half-century.
"That’s our only source of water. It’s been there for years. It's flowed every year," he said. "Once that plant went operational, boom — it stopped."
Water authority disagrees
Perhaps not surprisingly, water authority officials say their critics in Webster are all wet. They maintain the little stream never had a regular flow of water and point out that federal and state regulators who have revisited the site recently agree that the authority’s done nothing to make the stream any drier than it was before.
“They can find no reason to say the water treatment plant has had any effect on the volume of flow in that stream,” said Richard Metzger, the authority’s director of operations.
"Everybody who’s looked at it … doesn't come up with the same conclusion she does. It’s hard to follow her logic," Metzger said of Sandy Baldwin, who's been the most indefatigable of the neighbors. "Just because she says it doesn’t mean it’s true."
State Department of Environmental Conservation employees who trekked to the stream this summer "did not observe any blockages or other impediments to flow," the agency said in a statement. The stream appeared to carry the same amount of water when it left the water authority's property on the north as when it entered on the south.
Metzger said if the stream runs dry, that may be a natural occurrence. "That creek has been classified as an intermittent stream for decades. Intermittent means it flows sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t flow. That's not a new classification," he said.
There's no question the stream is intermittent now. If there's a lot of rain, the ponds top out. And in periods of no precipitation, the stream dries up again and the ponds slowly drain.
But it was not always this way, the neighbors insist.
Sandy Baldwin insists the creek never ran dry before, and has pulled together old aerial photos and family snapshots to show the flow was always enough to keep the pond full.
Baldwin said she and her husband slapped the water authority with a notice of claim — a precursor to a lawsuit against a public body — and sat down for a hearing. “We thought it would light a little fire under their butts so they’d give us more information, but it didn’t do a thing," she said.
The couple have not filed an actual lawsuit and say they prefer not to. Murphy, the golf course owner, said he is considering litigation himself.
"They caused this problem, they should fix it," Murphy said of the water authority. "If they don’t, we may have to force them to."
Water and wetlands
The water authority provides drinking water to about 740,000 people in suburban Monroe County and parts of four neighboring counties. It's an independent entity, answerable only indirectly to Monroe County elected leaders.
In its first half-century of service, the authority's water supply came chiefly from its Shoremont treatment plant in Greece. But authority officials had long desired a second plant on the county's east side, to better service growing demand in that part of its territory and to create a redundant source should Shoremont fail.
In 2008, after persuading critics that the plant was necessary, the water authority was given the go-ahead by state officials. Two years later, they broke ground on their plant on Basket Road, which can cleanse and distribute up to 50 million gallons a day of water drawn from Lake Ontario.
The Basket Road facility rests on a 42-acre parcel near Webster’s border with Wayne County. The land contained roughly 10 acres of wetlands that were protected under federal or state law. The unnamed stream flowed through those wetlands, according to maps and aerial photos compiled by the neighbors.
Wetlands are protected by law because they teem with life and perform vital roles in their ecosystems. But those laws also allow wetlands to be destroyed, and it's become commonplace for them to be filled in or paved over when people or institutions covet the space for another purpose.
The water authority obtained permits to permanently fill in about six acres of wetlands and affect adjacent wetlands temporarily. In compensation, the authority built 10 acres of wetlands elsewhere on the property.
A hydrologist who's conducted studies of the stream at the Baldwins' request believes the authority and its engineers miscalculated the impact of filling in those wetlands during construction.
“It think it was a simple oversight. Anyone could have made this mistake,” said Paul Richards, an associate professor in the Earth sciences department at The College at Brockport.
Richards thinks the wetlands fed the stream. There may have been natural springs beneath them that provided water. Filling in those wetlands turned the stream from perennial to intermittent, he said.
The replacement wetlands, while nearby, are not physically connected to the stream and do not appear to supply it with water, he concluded.
The authority also was given permission to temporarily affect flow in the stream during construction, and the Baldwins say it was graded over in 2010.
She complained then to the authority, which asked the DEC and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the agencies that had issued the wetlands permits — to come out and inspect the construction site.
They weren't impressed. "Staff could not attribute any of the issues the citizen raised to the construction of the ... water treatment plant," the DEC said in a statement sent to the Democrat and Chronicle.
Baldwin let the matter drop after flow resumed later in 2010. "Everything seemed to be fine until last year," she said.
A way out?
After the little stream leaves the Baldwins' six acres, it flows north through the arboretum and then onto the grounds of Webster Golf Club, where it traditionally provided water to irrigate the 36-hole course.
When the plant was under construction, Murphy, the club owner, wrangled a connection to a discharge pipe from the water authority plant to serve as an an emergency source of water.
With the creek running dry, the course has had tap that connection repeatedly. "If we didn’t have that, we’d be out of business," Murphy said.
"We’re paying for water that used to be free," he said.
After it leaves the golf course, the unnamed stream feeds into the considerably larger Fourmile Creek not far from Lake Road, a mile-and-a-half from the Baldwins' pond.
Trout and salmon anglers consider Fourmile Creek, which empties into Lake Ontario near the iconic Hedges lakefront restaurant, one of the region's little-known gems.
"It’s almost just crazy how many fish will come in. In terms of a fishery, it’s magic," Scott Feltrinelli, a fishing guide who helped bring about the creation of the 72-acre town nature preserve that borders Fourmile Creek south of Lake Road.
Feltrinelli fears the loss of flow in the unnamed tributary could alter the characteristics of Fourmile Creek enough that the trout and salmon who migrated upstream each fall to spawn might turn away.
Restoring flow is the solution, he said, and it wouldn't be hard.
The water authority collects rainwater and waste water from its treatment process in ponds on their property. A DEC permit allows the authority to discharge up to 2.4 million gallons of waste water every day to Lake Ontario.
Some of that water could be routed to the stream, they say.
Metzger, the water authority operations director, said the water authority probably could do that if the powers that be directed it.
"We would be absolutely on board if DEC or the Army Corps of Engineers or somebody wanted to supplement flows in creeks. But that takes an environmental impact statement. There’s more to it than just, 'Hey, put water in a creek,'" Metzger said.
But the DEC said it has no legal basis to ask the water authority to do that, since it doesn't believe the authority caused the flow to dry up in the first place.
If the authority took the lead, the DEC said in a statement, they'd be happy to help.
In other words, each said the other should act first.
However it's worked, Feltrinelli, who is passionate about Fourmile Creek, believes the water authority should divert some extra flow to the unnamed tributary.
“We want it fixed. We don’t care how it happened or who did it. What we care about is results," he said. "We want water to go back down the creek.”
