Water and the B-Stream
From MURRAY KEMPTON NEW YORK
MR. JOHNSON has avoided the steel strike which the union saw no way to escape and towards which a part of the industry rather looked forward. He ends thus the most triumphant summer in domestic affairs to be en- joyed by any president in a normal year of his nation's history. grand master of all private wars and of all public quarrels, except one.
The President simply cannot settle the con- flict between various levels of government, be- tween his own federal establishment and the regional ' fiefs of fifty governors and 1,000 mayors. The north-east, as an instance, is run- ning out of potable water; and Mr. Johnson's resources, which seem limitless everywhere else, are only ,pitiful here. A month ago he called a conference of Eastern governors and mayors to discuss ways of meeting the water emergency. The occasion reduced Mr. Johnson to the only remark he has made all summer which could truly be called a confession of impotence in a nation of which he was otherwise the omni- competent manager : 'Water supply,' he told the governors and sub-governors, 'is really a local responsibility. Only you are going to be able to conserve the water you now have. There is not much I can do about the one-third of Bob Wag- ner's water that we don't know where it's going.'
A few days later, Secretary of the Interior Udall came to New York to confer with Mayor Wagner and observed in the same wistful tone that . the city has the‘ reputation of having -the leakiest and most wasteful water supply system in the country. He was greeted at once with the contumely of Armand D'Angelo, New York's Commisioner of Electric and Water Supply, a gentle and earnest man who had been appointed to his position primarily to protect the handsome job property rights of the electricians' union and who had been functioning blissfully at the mercy of .the water department's civil service until he was engulfed by the crisis.
No one could say how much water New York was wasting every day through leaks and careless- ness; every day the city took 909 million gallons out of its reservoirs; and no one has yet been able to account for the consumption of more than 600,000. Poor Armand D'Angelo could only order all restaurants to serve water only at the direct request of the anti-communal diner. The Demo- crats, with Mayor Wagner retired, were savagely falling upon one another in a primary election; . the politician in quadrennial heat is New York's only facsimile of a civic conscience. The 'outs' gaily discdvered leaks in Central Park's reservoir, and the Water Commissioner, as permeable shield of the 'ins,' was driven at last to cry treason and to remove as saboteurs the two ranking engineers in his Manhattan District for having diverted the run-off from one leak amounting to 10,000 gallons a day into a public sewer.
These recreants unrepentantly replied that it was normal custom in the service to cover up and forget leaks in a reservoir where they happen to be especially numerous and of origins covered by the mists of time to be accepted as undetectable. It was an argument quite beyond any commis- sioner's powers of reason and persuasion. Their union raised a great cry for the suspended en- gineers; they were tried and swiftly restored to their jobs by a permanent department bureau- crat who knew very well how wrong it was for any outsider to cry treason about a custom of the service. Nothing has been heard from Armand
D'Angelo since and the city water department engages the crisis at its normal pace as invulner- able to the complaints of its own commanding officers as it is to those of the Secretary of the In- terior of' the United States.
The broad and noisome Hudson meanwhile flowed past New York every day and the city could not find a drop of it even salvageable for drinking by treatment anywhere below fifty-six miles up the river. No part of it within thirty- five miles of New York city is still con- sidered safe for swimming. The shad that were its great resource a generation ago have almost disappeared; it is water fit only for eels. The island of Manhattan daily discharges 500 million gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson; the states of New York and •New Jersey, which are the river's only protection. have held the city under continual court order to treat its sewage since 1948. The city was supposed to complete the work by 1957; its civil servants have done their best, but 30 per cent of the projected plants re- main unfinished; the deadline has twice been postponed; it is now 1966 and will, of course, be extended again.
Pollution control seems habitually to operate on this decelerated' timetable. Foto- years ago, after a hepatitis epidemic had forced closuic of its clam beds, the United States Public Health Service was emboldened to begin a study of pol- lution of New Jersey's Raritan Bay into which much of the Hudson flows. It ran at once into the strenuous opposition of the Health Departments of New York and New Jersey. The New Jersey commissioner of health argued that the Raritan is 'exquisitely related to the total biology and economy of the area, and the well-being and culture of its people,' and that it was outrageous for outsiders to question its health.
The Public Health Service struggled ahead with particular emphasis on the Arthur Kill, a peculiarly exquisite contribution to the biology of the area. which sluggishly divides New York from New Jersey, and runs into the Raritan Bay. The Arthur Kill may be the most polluted stream known to the Public Health Service; not even slugs and earthworms can survive in it. The Health Commissioner of New Jersey agreed that he would rate the Arthur Kill as a B-stream--- which means not recommended for bathing --but declared that it could hardly damage Raritan Bay because it seemed to flow northward.
But the Arthur Kill turned out, indeed, to dis- charge mainly into the Bay, and this revelation finally induced New Jersey to engage it; in 1963, as a result of what it called a six-year investigation, New Jersey cited five adjacent towns and three corporations as polluters of the Kill, and ordered them to clean up. The towns seem to have done What they could; they do, after all, live there; but the corporations, being under no such pressure, have done almost nothing.
And so the Public Health Service is very much where it was when it began at the Arthur Kill five years ago. The public clamour has, however, given it the chance to call state and local officials to New York for a conference on the pollution of the Hudson late this month. The Public Health Service will plead; local government will be scornful of its pretensions and affronted by its interference. Here alone must the representatives of an otherwise irresistible national government come as ambassadors to sovereign, distrustful • powers. •
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