The great local watershed divide that sends water in opposite directions is called the Danby Divide south of Ithaca. A bit of Tompkins County flows south on the watershed map all the way to the Chesapeake Bay, but most of our watershed area flows north to the Finger Lakes and the Great Lakes- St. Lawrence Basin.

This watershed divide is an important political and environmental divide as well. To the south, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) plays a big part in regulating water use. To the north, the Great Lakes Commission is missing in action.

While the SRBC is industryfriendly and, as regulators, they deserve careful observation by environmentalists, at least they are regulating water use. No such luck to the north. There really is no regulatory equivalent in the Great Lakes basin.

The Obama administration recently announced with fanfare their blueprint to “rescue” the Great Lakes from toxic contamination, invasive species and shrinking wildlife habitat. After the sound bites, this Great Lakes Restoration Initiative sounds very Midwest and urban, kind of like the Great Lakes Commission (des Grand Lacs) itself with its headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Folks in the eastern Great Lakes need to apply political pressure to get some of the $22 billion dollars that EPA’s Lisa Jackson said was “committed to a new standard of care that will leave the Great Lakes a better place for the next generation.”

The Obama administration brags that the restoration initiative will protect 100,000 acres of wetland, a puny patch (maybe the size of LBJ’s ranch?) given that the Great Lakes watershed is a big hunk of the North American continent. This also makes me think the hinterlands will be neglected by this initiative.

The Great Lakes Commission itself just formed a new commission to “integrate” energy and water resource decisions and members are studying the effect of pricing on water use, very industryand municipality-oriented. Water use in our part of the watershed doesn’t seem a worry to them.

In the Finger Lakes, we need an infrastructure to monitor and protect water resources from gas drilling, especially if the onslaught of Marcellus Shale drilling begins. And the DEC is no help. The New York State Department of Conservation addressed water management so poorly in the draft statement on Marcellus Shale drilling that you would have imagined a robust regulatory system already in place in the Great Lakes basin, but no.

To be fair, the SRBC has to coordinate between the federal government and three states, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, while the bi-national Great Lakes Commission adds more states and the complexity of international treaties.

The SRBC is relatively transparent. They are rolling out a new user-friendly Web site (www.srbc .net) and looking for partners for their Remote Water Quality Monitoring Network which will place a few new modern water monitoring stations called “datasondes” on smaller streams that may be impacted by Marcellus Shale drilling and water withdrawals.

Michael Brownell, chief of SRBC’s Water Resource Management Division, likes to complain about media distortions about gas drilling. At one meeting in October, he crossly allowed that something bad may have happened in Dimock, Pa., (where natural gas drilling has ruined groundwater in a large area), but at another meeting a few weeks ago, he worried about “eco-terrorists turning on a valve ” to make gas companies look bad.

Which is a bit worrisome. A year ago, William Pammer spoke in Ithaca. The long-time Sullivan County Planning Commissioner, warned, “Regulators become unconsciously part of the industry they regulate.”

This is true. So when SRBC’s Brownell uses statistics to “prove” that water use for Marcellus Shale drilling amounts to a drop in the bucket, swallow those statistics with a bit of brine. The Susquehanna River has long been an industry river, and Brownell did educate us, to put things in perspective, about the massive water use of a proposed nuclear power plant.

But for all the impressive graphs that again “prove” that water withdrawal allowances for gas drillers is very low, the fact is that these water drawdowns have not been done before on secondary streams and creeks.

We need to watch the SRBC closely and we need to work with them. To their credit, their leadership people will sit in front of folks and answer questions. Their regulatory information is available to the public. The Great Lakes Commission poohbas should scrape the zebra mussels off a boat in Lake Michigan and come out and talk to us, too

TAGGED WITH: drinking water, Great Lakes, Marcellus Shale, SRBC, watershed