LMCSers resolve a creek canard

Have water levels really dropped?

By Art Steinhauer | Manor Ink Mentor

Roscoe, NY – Bruce Pollock, president of Theodore Gordon Flyfishers, had long heard it asked by fellow anglers, “Where’s the water?”

Catskill fishermen often say that rainfall and the water levels in local waterways have dropped over the years. Suspicions were voiced that the town’s sewage plant was either using or discharging too much effluvium, or that the two breweries in town were siphoning water out of the streams. Neither of those scenarios had any basis in fact. But was it true that water levels and flows had dropped precipitously?

Pollock approached Livingston Manor Central School with a proposal to do research into the lower-water claims. He was put in contact with science teacher Paul Todd-Favata, and together they conceived a project to have students in Favata’s Regents Earth Science class look into river data. The US Geological Survey had a water monitoring station that collects water levels along the Willowemoc, just up DeBruce Road from LMCS.

After contacting the USGS office in Honesdale, PA, the class was able to get access to over 70 years of data from the monitoring station to analyze.

Favata assigned each decade, from the 1950s to the 2020s, to partners in the class so that the students could analyze stream discharge levels and rainfall throughout the years. Though some teams found there was missing discharge data for some periods due to aged equipment, the overall data proved to be informative.

The decade-by-decade results, starting with the 1950s, were unveiled by class teams to Pollock and Theodore Gordon Flyfishers board member Kelley Buchta, co-owner of Dette Flies. The conclusions showed no meaningful difference in annual rainfall or water flow, when examined on a long-term basis. However, what was also evident was that frequent major weather events, such as Hurricane Irene, have caused significant anomalies in rainfall and water flow during measuring periods.

“Paul and his students did a fantastic job organizing and analyzing the data,” said Pollock of the findings. “The graphs confirmed what many of us suspected.”

Favata agreed. “This is the value of good science, to look at the actual evidence of what is happening and then go on to draw conclusions,” he said. Favata anticipates continuing the project, using data from other USGS monitoring stations, as well as engaging in other community-based initiatives with his students.

Manor Ink Reporter Rachel Zuckerman helped with this story.