About 150 miles northwest of Manhattan, the Cannonsville Reservoir is the newest and largest reservoir built for New York City’s water supply system. It’s one of four reservoirs that make up the city’s Delaware watershed system. 

But before the reservoir was built, five communities stood there and were destroyed in the 1960s in pursuit of New York City’s search for clean drinking water.

New York City used eminent domain – a government’s authority to take private property – to remove the Town of Cannonsville in 1964 along with other communities to construct the Cannonsville Reservoir.

More than sixty years after it was placed into service, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) are now looking at what it would take to expand the Cannonsville Reservoir along with several other water storage options.

READ: NYC to Study Possible Expansion of Cannonsville Reservoir as Part of Drought Planning

Enlarging the Cannonsville Reservoir is one of more than 2,500 potential storage projects the DRBC considered in 2023. The study’s engineering consultant Matt MacDonald reviewed options including building new reservoirs, expanding existing ones, and using abandoned mines and quarries. 

Cannonsville Reservoir emerged as one of a handful of feasible storage options that would increase the reservoir’s storage volume by 13 billion gallons of water and require raising the dam by a water level of eight feet.

Chad Pindar, planning manager of the DRBC, says Cannonsville Reservoir is especially viable because of its gravity-based storage facility with existing infrastructure.

“We’re not needing to pump water out of a river and into the reservoir. It’s actually draining into that reservoir by gravity,” said Pindar. “Those type[s] of projects obviously don’t incur all those pumping costs.”

DRBC says that planning for droughts and future water storage is part of their long-term resiliency planning as a regulatory agency.

“We don’t know if we need additional water, but what my group has been tasked [with] is if [DRBC’s] Commissioners do decide that we need additional water, where might we be able to get that additional storage,” Pindar told Radio Catskill.

The study outlines that the raise would expand the pool footprint by about 760 acres. While no buildings would be flooded, road sections would need to be elevated or relocated.

The study to explore expanding the reservoir would be paid for by New York City DEP. A DEP spokesperson told Radio Catskill that it “supports DRBC’s efforts studying potential sources, such as the Cannonsville Reservoir or several quarries, to supplement river flow during times of drought and their consideration of the technical, environmental, and financial feasibility of such a project.”

“Any future decisions must also account for the human elements of such a project, and the commitments that DEP has made to our neighbors upstream and downstream of the reservoir,” said the DEP spokesperson.

A decades-long, complicated history

The latest feasibility study isn’t the first time New York City has considered expanding the Cannonsville Reservoir. 

In the 1980s, New York considered enlarging the reservoir but faced significant community pushback along with financial and environmental threats. The proposal was eventually abandoned.

New York City displaced more than 940 people through eminent domain to build the Cannonsville Reservoir in the 1950s and 1960s from the five communities of Beerston, Cannonsville, Rock Rift, Rock Royal, and Granton.

Diane Galusha is the Town of Middletown historian and author of the 1999 book, Liquid Assets, which chronicles the history of New York City’s water system. 

“You can’t imagine there would be very many people raising their hands and saying, ‘Yes, yes, you know, give me the money. I want to get out.’ There were some who did that, but in essence, to complete a project of this magnitude, a public works project like this, they had to claim land and private property – a lot of private property,” said Galusha.

Galusha says decades of fraught history still simmer below the surface for some residents on who has land and power in the Catskills.

“There was a sentiment that [New York City has] purchased so much land that future development potential has been hurt,” said Galusha. “When you talk about acquiring land, you can’t avoid the gorilla in the room, which was how much land has already been taken from Delaware County and the Catskills.” 

Pindar of DRBC says the potential study is in its preliminary planning stages, with storage projects often taking decades to develop and come to fruition. Significant community input would be part of how to move forward, he says. 

“Obviously a project like the expansion of Cannonsville [Reservoir], if it were to be proposed, would have to pass through certain regulatory agencies… there’d be multiple permits and different permitting authorities associated with those, and obviously they would take into account public comment during the decision-making,” said Pindar.

Still, Galusha is skeptical of revisiting the study and doubts it will reach a different conclusion than the findings it had reached in 1986.

DRBC and New York City’s DEP are looking to finalize the intergovernmental agreement to kick off the study. Pindar says the engineering planning study to enlarge the Cannonsville Reservoir may be completed by June 2028.