Historic N.J. reservoir to be replaced with huge concrete water tanks – NJ.com

Despite the barbed wire perimeter fence, the 135-year-old Stanley M. Levine Reservoir provides a refreshing but semi-natural beauty for residents of the Paterson neighborhood that surrounds it.

“It’s not like a park that you can walk in,” said Angel Disla, a 40-year-old trucking company owner who lives with his wife and two children on Reservoir Avenue. “But at least there’s a view.”

Both rusted and rustic, with mature pine trees now lining its west bank and a natural rock wall forming its eastern shore, the long, narrow reservoir is like a small finger lake on the northern flank of Garret Mountain, off Route 80.

On one of this week’s sweltering afternoons, as children shrieked in the city’s Lou Costello Pool on the other side of the ancient oxidized fence encircling the reservoir, ducks floated on its glassy, green surface as the mountain’s wooded summit and brick smokestacks from Paterson’s industrial past loomed above.

But that view may change dramatically within just a few years, now that officials of six state and federal environmental and historic preservation agencies, plus the mayor of Paterson, have signed off on an agreement allowing the Passaic Valley Water Commission to replace the open-air reservoir with a pair of 2.5-million-gallon enclosed concrete water tanks. The tanks would be located within the footprint of the reservoir, which measures about 1,000 feet long by 300 feet across, and partially hidden by trees and other plantings.

The water commission, which serves 800,000 people in Passaic, Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Morris counties, announced the agreement this week.

“Groundbreaking is expected later this year with construction to be completed within 2 years,” the announcement stated, adding that the commission will now begin planning the replacement of its New Street Reservoir.

A copy of the agreement, which lays out the history and parameters of the reservoir replacement project, was provided to NJ Advance Media by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, one of the seven signatories.

The $26 million project would protect drinking water from impurities including the diarrhea-causing Cryptosporidium found in bird droppings. Open-air reservoirs are vulnerable to such contaminants for obvious reasons, and their construction was banned more than a decade ago under a provision of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act of 1996.

A federal-state grant program created under the Clean Water Act, the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, would pay for the project, according to the agreement.

Passaic Valley is not the only water utility dogged by aging reservoirs.

Trenton Water Works, owned by the state’s capital city, is being sued jointly by the state Departement of Environmental Protection and several municipalities, charging that the utility has failed to adequately invest in system upgrades, endangering water quality.

This week’s announcement from Passaic Valley said planning and design are now underway for the replacement of its New Street Reservoir, a project the commission acknowledged has been opposed by residents who, like Angel Disla, are concerned that tanks would spoil their view.

In addition to Levine and New Street, Passaic Valley is also planning to replace its third open-air reservoir, Great Notch, as part of an overall reservoir replacement plan projected to cost a total of $135 million.

The Levine Reservoir was constructed in 1885 and is named for a Passaic Valley water commissioner and Paterson businessman who died in 1989. The reservoir sits about a quarter-mile south of the Paterson Great Falls Historic Park and within the broader Old Great Falls Historic District, where mills powered by the Passaic River helped realize Alexander Hamilton’s vision of Paterson as the cradle of America’s industrial revolution.

In such a historically sensitive location, the reservoir replacement has been opposed by preservationists, and the environmental and historic review process dates back over a decade.

The memorandum signing itself was similarly protracted, taking two months, from May 8 to July 2, to garner the seven signatures of officials from the EPA, the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, the state Department of Environmental Protection, the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh and the water commission’s executive director, Joseph Bella.

Like the City of Newark, which has embarked on water line replacement project after years of lead contamination, Passaic Valley is also replacing thousands of water lines to bring down lead levels. And replacement of the Levine Reservoir, as well as the commission’s New Street and Great Notch open-air reservoirs goes hand in hand with that effort.

Typically, phosphates are added to drinking water to combat lead contamination. But, Bella told NJ Advance Media in January, phosphates can’t be used by Passaic Valley because they would act as a nutrient in the exposed water of the open-air reservoirs, encouraging the growth of harmful bacteria growth.

Disla, Levine’s neighbor on Reservoir Drive, was unimpressed by the science. He and other taxpayers are the ones who’ll have to fork over that $26 million to pay for the project. And instead of a calm little lake out his front window, the view could look more like a tank farm.

“That’s been there for years,” Disla said of the reservoir. And of all the people he knows, he added, “Nobody got sick.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips