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1 Reviews
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 sheaman42 rated 6 months ago- All along the East Coast, drought has shriveled streams as never before. But tucked in the woods 70 miles north of New York City, a deep pool of clear water spills into a sparkling brook that runs downhill to the Hudson River.
No matter how dry the weather, gauges measure a flow of four million to six million gallons a day.
No one is thrilled, however.
The sinkhole and half a dozen other springs and wet spots nearby are fed by leaks 600 feet underground in one of the most important water tunnels in the world, the 85-mile Delaware Aqueduct.
This 57-year-old tunnel carries, on average, half of New York City's daily supply of a billion-plus gallons of water from reservoirs along the Delaware River where it rises in the Catskill Mountains. It also supplies this town and many others along its route to the city.
At certain times of the year, the tunnel carries 90 percent of the water for the nine million people served by the sprawling 19-reservoir water system, which has long been considered an engineering marvel of the industrial era.
When the tunnel is at full capacity, about 36 million gallons a day escape through uncharted breaks in the concrete and steel lining, engineers for the city say. That might not seem much in a billion-gallon-a-day system, but the leak equals the total daily water usage of Rochester.
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