There's something in the water
in New York City, at least that's what New Yorkers claim.
The city's water has been credited for making things
like pizza and bagels tastes better
yet getting this water to the taps
of over eight and a half million people is no easy feat.
From pristine reservoirs,
The scope and scale
of this water supply was unlike anything
that was ever tried in modern society.
To the state-of-the-art treatment facilities.
So, in this facility we're treating somewhere
between 900 million to a billion gallons a day.
To the tops of some
of New York city's famous skyscrapers.
My dad always said that Paris has the Eiffel tower.
Pisa has the Leaning Tower.
New York has the Water Tower.
Without this infrastructure,
New York City would not be the metropolis it is today.
It's really important work that New Yorkers don't see,
but they certainly appreciate everyday
when they turn on that tap
and the water's there without having to think about it.
This is how a billion gallons
of sparkling clean water gets
to New York City every day.
(mysterious music)
(strings music)
While most of the city's
water infrastructure is hidden from view,
there is at least one very visible piece.
It's a famous New York icon and a business
that is still very much thriving today.
Water tanks.
Hi, I'm Henry Rosenwach,
fifth generation of Rosenwach Tank.
So my great grandfather, Harris Rosenwach,
bought a barrel company in the 1800s
and converted that at the time
into the Rosenwach Tank Company,
which is the company you see today.
From that point on has been passed down from father to son.
My father always said,
"Without water tanks and Rosenwach,
that New York City would go dry."
If you ever go down in the street and you speak to a tourist
or someone who's not from New York city and they look up
and they see these wood water tanks,
they may think it's some archaic, non-functioning water tank
on top of a building
when in fact it's the heartbeat to the building.
It's the most vital piece of equipment, maybe on the roof.
These wooden water tanks
that dot New York's skyline provide drinking water,
fire suppression, or both to buildings six stories
or higher.
They are built to last 30 years or more.
With so many tanks to maintain Rosenwach Tanks
spend several days a week tearing down old tanks
and replacing them with new ones.
You can't afraid of heights,
otherwise you can't do this job.
CJ Adonis has been working
with Rosenwach Tanks for 17 years.
I'm from Ghana and where I'm from,
buildings is not this tall
and when I come to this country,
I was amazed of all these big skyscrapers.
And when I started working on the water towers,
it was amazing to me.
Some people have to pay for the view.
I'm seeing the view free everyday.
(strings music)
As time has progressed,
there have been newer systems that have come into place
and have taken the place of the wood tank;
however, when it comes to energy usage, cost,
and trying to value engineer something,
the wood tank, from experience,
and from what we see in the field has been the way to go.
You don't have to have a pump running 24/7,
whereas on the tank, just water is fed from gravity.
If there's a power outage, you still have water in the tank.
But most importantly,
the fire code requires a certain amount of gallons on a tank
so that if a fire broke out,
there would always be water to put out the fire
from the water tank.
My dad always said that Paris has the Eiffel tower.
Pisa has the Leaning Tower.
New York has the water tower.
There's no other place like New York
that you see these wood water tanks in the skyline.
It's one of a kind.
While some call it the champagne of water today,
New York's water supply was once quite the opposite.
There was an editorial written in the early 1800s
that described Broadway, right?
We think of Broadway as this great wide gleaming street.
Back then, it was described as having filth
that was ankle deep in the consistency of bean soup.
And this filth would infiltrate
Manhattan's water.
When settlers first arrived on the shores
of this marshy island,
a limited amount of usable water was available.
Despite Manhattan being surrounded by rivers,
their proximity to the ocean makes them too salty
to be a source of drinking water.
Freshwater ponds and springs
and later the introduction of wells provided water
for the city's growing population
throughout early European settlements.
Yet with the lack of any infrastructure for trash or sewage
at the time,
residents would pour their waste into the streets
or waterways.
The water became infamously contaminated.
Only the wealthy could afford to pay for water
from fresh springs up north.
It was well-known that drinking beer was safer
than drinking water, but as the city grew,
it was becoming obvious that pints of beer weren't going
to cut it for much longer.
In stepped Aaron Burr,
at the dawn of the 19th century,
before the Vice-President notoriously killed
Alexander Hamilton in a deadly duel,
Burr proposed creating a waterworks system,
but in truth only did so to pocket money for a future bank
that would rival Hamilton's.
That bank would become JP Morgan Chase.
Burr's Manhattan company tapped into existing wells
to get water for their pipes
in a city already plagued by contaminated well water.
It built wooden water pipes that suffered from low pressure,
froze in the winter, and suffered constant leaks.
Without a proper foundation for accessible water,
the city was in trouble.
Yellow Fever hit the city hard
around the turn of the century.
Mosquitoes multiplied in the sewage soaked streets.
In 1832, the cholera outbreak would shake the city
to its core.
The disease swept through Manhattan,
spreading through water or food.
The epidemic would claim thousands of lives.
The tipping point was The Great Fire of 1835,
which destroyed nearly 700 buildings in Manhattan.
Firefighters couldn't tap into any
of the frozen water sources during the cold December night
and many watched helplessly as it tore
through 17 city blocks
By 1837, work was finally underway to engineer a system
that would provide New York with a fresh supply of water.
Not even 50 miles from the city,
a water source was waiting to be tapped.
The old Croton Dam was completed in 1842.
An aqueduct carried water via gravity
from the Croton River in Westchester County to reservoirs
in Manhattan.
Clean water was welcomed into the city with much fanfare.
And essentially when they turn it on in July of 1842,
many of these problems,
fire, filth, disease, go away essentially overnight, right?
It solves the public health issue.
The gravity fed nature provides pressurized fire-fighting
the way we think of it today.
And they're able to keep the city healthy and clean.
When the Croton system was first built,
it was much smaller than the Croton system we have now.
Eventually the city outgrew that system
and it had to expand it
and the first thing that it did was it began
by building this dam here,
which made the Croton reservoir a lot larger.
It built some other reservoirs upstream and it actually
built a second aqueduct, the new Croton aqueduct.
It was actually part of an expansion
that matched the needs to quench the thirst
of more and more New Yorkers as the city was growing.
So we're here today at new Croton Dam.
When it was built in 1905,
it was the biggest dam in the world and as you can see,
it was built with this beautiful spillway that people come
from all over to enjoy
because sometimes Mother Nature gives us a little more water
than we can hold on to.
Today, New York City receives 10%
of its water from the Croton system.
So even though this system dates back 179 years,
it's still important to New York City today
to bring that clean, potable, delicious water
that New Yorkers are used to.
And they made it very clear that their goal was not
just to build a water supply,
to allow for the growth and public health of the city,
but their goal was that this water supply was gonna
be New York City's contribution
to the great public works of
the great societies of the history of the world.
And that was what they set out to do.
And when you look at the dams from that time,
they're not just great structures in the sense
that they're sound and the engineering on them was great,
but they were also built to look beautiful
and to be stunning showpieces
to what New York City was capable of accomplishing
when it mobilized all of its talent and its abilities
to essentially provide a necessary utility
to its citizens.
Without water, no community small, medium,
or large can survive.
This just happened to be the solution
that met the needs of New York City
and it was a brilliant solution considered a marvel
of modern engineering
because of the gravity fed nature of the system,
because there were a lot of measures put in place
to protect the water at its source,
and because the scope and scale
of this water supply was unlike anything
that was ever tried in modern society after
the Egyptians and the Romans.
While this reservoir was a marvel on its own,
soon the city would need to find more water.
By the end of the 19th century, the city,
as we know it today began to take shape.
The five boroughs consolidated
to form the City of Greater New York
and its population began to soar,
growing by about 115,000 people per year.
By 1904, New York was home to 4 million.
The city barely escaped a water shortage more than once
during this time.
The New York City Board of Water Supply was created in 1905
and tasked with finding another source of water
at whatever cost.
Many towns in upstate New York were claimed
via eminent domain.
They were flooded so that New York City could keep growing.
This played out throughout the building of more reservoirs
throughout the 20th century, creating what is today,
the Catskill Delaware Watershed System.
Together, they provide the city with 90% of its water.
The Ashokan reservoir is just one of 19 reservoirs
in the system.
four towns were submerged and eight were relocated
by the time the reservoir was completed in 1915.
More than 2000 people were forced out of their homes
often without fair compensation or ample notice.
32 cemeteries were excavated and moved.
The city even paid community members $15
to move their dead elsewhere.
(somber music)
Ashokan Reservoir stores 125 billion gallons of water.
It's responsible for about 40% of the water
that goes into the city.
Today's mission is to protect water quality
at the source.
New York City has actually purchased
about 180,000 acres of property over the past 20 to 25 years
to preserve as forever wild,
understanding that the land along steep slopes,
the land that includes streams or wetlands
can actually have an effect on the quality of water
that ends up running off here.
The city also collaborates
with land owners surrounding water sources
to ensure further protection of the water.
So we've had visitors in the past decade from the UK,
Canada, Israel, China, Singapore, India, Columbia,
literally from almost every continent
because the scientific community
around the globe recognizes
that what has been done here has been unique and effective.
(upbeat music)
Maintaining water sources
like this requires careful work
by Water Quality Field Scientists like Caitlyn Korren.
She begins her day
at the Department of Environmental Protection office
in Kingston, New York, about 100 miles outside the city.
Before water can be tested in the field,
all equipment like these sondes must be calibrated
in the lab.
So the idea is that this is supposed
to be saturated water.
So we're trying to calibrate it to a known saturation
with water aerated by a sonde as our standard.
And these allow us to continuously monitor other parameters,
such as turbidity and fDOM and algae,
which are some really important parameters
for understanding how our water bodies work.
Scientists then travel to the source itself,
where they may pay a visit to a robo hut
where they can monitor water quality.
This data logger is storing the data that's coming up
from the stream every 15 minutes.
We have remote telemetry in here so we can access it
from far away.
So if there's a storm or some other events going on,
if it is hard to get here,
we can actually look at what's going on in the water.
Nearby, another scientist, Justin Zimmerman,
is testing the water and gathering samples
at the creek.
Our scientists are going out
and taking bottles like this
and grabbing about 60,000 samples a year.
And then they take them back to the lab
and they're analyzed 600 to 700,000 times a year.
That means we're testing it almost 2000 times a day.
You're talking about a massive amount of data
that we're gathering, interpreting,
and using to make decisions
about how we operate the water supply.
All the decisions we make are based on sound science.
This is the sound science.
But there are several more layers
of protection the water must go through.
This is really the only place you can come
and hear your water sing to you
because, as the water runs through these units,
runs through these pipes, run through the baffles,
it creates this little hum.
Don't stay too long.
It'll turn your brain to pea soup.
No, it won't do that.
The city prides itself
on having one of the only sources
of unfiltered water in the country.
It is only treated with Chlorine, Fluoride,
food grade Phosphoric Acid
and UV light said facilities like this one,
the Catskill Delaware UV Treatment Facility
in Westchester County, New York.
So in this facility we're treating somewhere
between 900 million to a billion gallons a day.
The water flows into one of the 56 tanks.
Each one equipped with 210 UV light bulbs.
As it flows through at 1.5 meters per second,
the light kills waterborne pathogens
that could make humans sick.
This facility, like all our facilities are built,
not for the city we have today,
but the city we might have a hundred years from now, right?
So this was built to treat more than 2 billion gallons
of water.
We'll use less than 1 billion.
Another facility located
underneath the golf course in the Bronx treats water
from the Croton system in this same way.
We're just taking a process that happens in nature
because the wavelength of UV light that we're using
in these units exists naturally from the sun.
We're just replicating that here in a facility
for the very specific purpose of disinfecting this water,
so that it's clean and safe to drink.
It's like a tanning booth on steroids, right?
I mean, you could not go in there,
open your eyes and not suffer damage to your vision.
It's very, very, very bright.
The Department of Environmental Protection
must think about not only providing water for the city,
but also protecting it and maintaining these systems.
We have a bank of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of car batteries that will run this place
for a period of time to ensure the generators kick on
because we don't wanna go one second
without making sure that the water is treated
with this light.
That's how redundant we think, right?
We have to think that way.
We're protecting the biggest city
in the country.
I take that serious.
A facility like this has thousands and thousands
of maintenance tasks being performed by city employees
to ensure that this water supply runs reliably
every single day.
And it's really important work that New Yorkers don't see,
but they certainly appreciate every day
when they turn on that tap and the water is there
without having to think about it.
After the water is treated,
it can then continue its journey to the city.
Water reaches the city via three main tunnels,
aptly named water tunnels one, two and three.
The first two began operating in 1917 and 1936 respectively.
The third has been in use with different sections
opening in 1998 in 2013.
It is just now nearing its final stages of completion
after more than 50 years of construction.
It is the most expensive capital project the city has ever
taken on with the price tag of $6 billion.
The tunnel will serve as a backup because if something were
to happen to water tunnels number one or two,
millions of people would go without water.
The completion of tunnel number three
will also allow the city to shut down another tunnel
for repairs.
24 people have died during construction of the third tunnel.
Despite its international fame, New York's water system
doesn't come without its share of problems.
In the early 1990s,
leaks were discovered in the Delaware aqueduct.
The aqueduct is tasked with providing the city
with 500 million gallons of water a day
yet it has been leaking 20 million gallons every day
for the past 30 years.
A solution with a $1.2 billion estimated price tag has been
in the works for years.
The Delaware aqueduct bypass tunnel will allow the city
to drain the main aqueduct for repairs and reroute the water
around the damaged tunnel.
Climate change also proves a threat
to New York City's water supply.
Droughts have been carefully monitored
over the years, but the real problem the region will face
is increased rainfall and frequency of storms.
This could lead to more turbidity in the water supply,
which is essentially muddy water.
The city is already coming to grips with this reality.
But planning for the future
of New York City's water has always been part of the job.
We know that New York City's water is heralded
around the world as being some of the best water anywhere,
but certainly it doesn't happen by accident, right?
A lot of planning, decades, centuries of planning went into
building this system.
And that planning goes on to this very day,
planning for the infrastructure work
that we need to do,
not only 10 years from now, but 50, 60 years from now
to ensure that the water supply stays
in good operating condition and good state of repair.
(inspirational music)
From mountain streams
to the tops of skyscrapers,
this is the system that New Yorkers
and its visitors can thank for its water.
The system is unbelievable, I would say.
And I'm so proud to get to work in a company like this
and for the system.
That's only if they ever stop
to think about it.
As a New Yorker,
we are very fortunate to have running water.
It's something we do take for granted every day.
We're sort of the great silent service.
You wake up in the morning to brush your teeth,
take a shower, make your coffee.
You turn that tap.
The water has been there every single day since 1842.
We take a lot of pride in that.
If we're doing our job right,
New Yorkers should never have to think about
where their water is coming from or the quality
of the water.
(upbeat music)