The Delaware Aqueduct carries the water from the, watershedRondout Reservoir and the Cannonsville, Neversink, and Pepacton reservoirs via the Delaware and Neversink tunnels. Combined, the four reservoirs account for of watershed and of capacity, of which goes to the city daily — 50% of the entire system's. All this water is fed from the Rondout to West Branch Reservoir in Putnam County, then to the Kensico, and Hillview reservoirs in southern Westchester County, before continuing on to distribution within New York City.
Leak problems
The Delaware Aqueduct leaks up to per day. A $1 billion project to repair the leaking was scheduled to begin in January 2013. Since the late 1970s, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection has been monitoring two leaks that collectively release between of water per day. These leaks have caused many problems with flooding and drinking water contamination, particularly for residents of Wawarsing, New York. In the town of Newburgh, southeast, residents thought that a stream bubbling out of a wetlands was a natural artesian well; in reality, the water was coming from of a tunnel created by the force of water blasting from a crack in the aqueduct buried 650 feet underground. Combined with the leak in Wawarsing, the NYCDEP admitted in the early 1990s that the aqueduct was leaking at a rate of up to a day, enough water to supply nearly half a million people.
New York Bypass
The NYCDEP is building a Rondout-West Branch Bypass Tunnel beneath the Hudson, which will allow it to bypass the leak. Construction began in November 2013 and is expected to be finished sometime in 2021. "The number's going to be $1.5 billion to do the entire program to make the fix," said Paul Rush, Deputy Commissioner of the NYCDEP. "About two-thirds of it, $1 billion, will actually go into constructing a bypass tunnel around the location with the most significant leakage in Roseton, and to do additional concrete grouting in the Wawarsing section." The new bypass tunnel will be one of the most complicated undertakings in the NYCDEP's history. Near the end of construction, the entire Delaware Aqueduct will be shut down to allow the bypass to be connected. It will be dewatered so that the leaks in Wawarsing, and Newburgh, can be fixed. Shutting the aqueduct will deprive New York City of nearly half its water supply. To compensate, the NYCDEP is making improvements to other parts of the system. Construction on the portion of the bypass tunnel that crosses under the Hudson River from Newburgh to Wappinger began on January 8, 2018 in Newburgh. The tunnel boring machine, named NORA after Nora Stanton Blatch Deforest Barney, reached Wappinger on August 13, 2019, after drilling through of 12,448 feet of bedrock located 700 to 800 feet below ground level.
