A Key to New York City's Water Quality That's Hiding in Plain Sight

New York Times

01-05-2025

Hundreds of cast-iron boxes standing chest-high on the sidewalks of New York City are there to provide an essential service to residents. But these silver sentinels go largely unnoticed, their purpose a mystery to the millions who shuffle past.
Once in a while, a city employee will stop by and unlock one of the small safes and provide passers-by a glimpse of its contents: what looks like a tiny, street-side kitchen sink, complete with a long-necked faucet.
Wait, what?
It is just what it appears to be. Each of the sturdy lockboxes, custom-made to withstand the urban rigors, is a water sampling station maintained by the city's Department of Environmental Protection.
There are nearly 1,000 of them across the five boroughs and they have been there for more than 25 years. But few people ever get a peek inside unless they happen to be nearby when one of the city's scientists comes along to perform tests and collect a sample.
Otherwise, they might mistake the boxes for pieces of utility infrastructure or traffic-monitoring equipment.
'People don't notice them until you point them out,' said Lori Emery, the city's director of water quality.
As Amy Murphy, 43, a water ecology scientist, took some samples from a station outside a housing complex in the Elmhurst section of Queens, two people carrying groceries from a car stared into the open box as if confounded by its contents.
Ms. Emery said the city had a team of 28 testers who make daily rounds in city vehicles to take samples from the faucets, which draw water from mains beneath the street just before it gets piped into homes in the neighborhood. The samples are tested for temperature, color, clarity and levels of salt, chemicals and coliform bacteria, which could indicate the water is polluted.
The workers perform some tests on site, then fill plastic bottles and transport them to a lab in Queens or Westchester County for more testing.
The sampling stations allow for regular testing without going into people's homes or businesses, said Paul Rush, the deputy commissioner for the Bureau of Water Supply, which is part of the Department of Environmental Protection.
'Getting access is an extra complication,' he said. 'This provides quality control and makes every sample comparable.'
The sampling is critical because, unlike in many other American cities, most of the one billion gallons of water that reach residential taps in New York each day are unfiltered, Mr. Rush said. Fluoride and chlorine — to kill bacteria — are added to the water, and it is disinfected with ultraviolet light.
The water courses down from upstate reservoirs as far as 125 miles from the city, receiving only a few additives, including chlorine and fluoride, along the way. Most of the city's drinking water comes from watersheds in the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley and is 'of very high quality,' according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The water travels from those watersheds, pulled primarily by gravity, to a pair of giant underground tunnels, the younger of which is 89 years old. A third water tunnel to the city is nearing completion, at an estimated cost of $5 billion, after 55 years of construction.
Once it's in the city, the water is distributed through a vast network of smaller pipes to residential and commercial buildings, where it is used for bathing, cooking, cleaning and flushing.
That water has been dubbed the 'champagne of drinking water' after repeatedly winning taste tests against other sources in the state, the Department of Environmental Conservation said. Popular legend has it that the particular quality of the tap water is what makes the city's bagels and pizza so distinctly tasty.
'New York water does have a good taste and it's not by accident,' Mr. Rush said. 'We want to deliver water that tastes good, that's aesthetically pleasing.'
Some of the 8.8 million customers are quite discriminating, Mr. Rush said. They are not slow to call in complaints to the city's 311 line if they notice even subtle changes in the taste of their tap water, he said.
In 2017, when the department performed some repairs on its infrastructure in the Delaware Watershed, it had to switch some customers to water from the Croton Watershed in a more developed area closer to the city, Mr. Rush recalled.
'During that time, we received a slew of taste and odor complaints,' he said.
The city's 311 data show that the number of annual complaints about the taste or smell of the water rose slightly to 814 in 2017, then jumped to more than 1,200 in 2018 and more than 2,000 in 2021. Then in 2023, it fell to about 700, the data show.
There was nothing wrong with the water, which was sampled regularly at the stations scattered around the city, Mr. Rush said. Some New Yorkers, he added, are just conditioned to having their water taste a certain way.
'When we switched back, the complaints dropped off,' he said.