What to do with that old fishing line? The high-density, nylon fishing line (known as monofilament) can pose a hazard to wildlife if it’s disposed of improperly. From Florida’s Monofilament Recovery and Recycling Program:

“Most monofilament is non-biodegradable-it lasts about 600 years. Because it is thin and often clear, it is very difficult for birds and animals to see and they can easily brush up against it and become entangled in it. Once entangled, they may become injured, may drown, may become strangled, or may starve to death. Many animals also ingest fishing line. One recovered sea turtle was found to have consumed 590 feet of heavy-duty fishing line.”

Most fishing line (those without wires or ones that are braided) can be recycled. To that end, Westchester has installed line receptacles at nine of its county parks. Westchester County Executive Andy Spano today will be inspecting one of the new fishing line recycling containers at Glen Island Park in New Rochelle.

Update: The county has installed fishing line recycling bins at 10 county parks and says bait and tackle shops, marinas and some municipalities have agreed to do the same. Municipalities, Spano said, have also agreed to distribute waterproof, self-mailing envelopes to those who apply for fishing licenses. The envelopes can be used by those who fish remote locations -mailing back both their own, used line and any discovered out in the wilds.

The line collected in the bins and the envelopes will be sent to the Berkley Pure Fishing Company in Iowa, where it will be recycled into raw plastic pellets used to manufacture tackle boxes and other products.

Open space and river knowledge. Make sure you catch two, environmentally related stories in today’s paper about those things. One is from my colleague Greg Clary about Gov. Spitzer signing the Hudson Valley Community Preservation Act. The other is about The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries and IBM developing a network of sensors that would monitor the entire length of the Hudson River.

Here’s a prior post about the CPA.

Boats won’t be able to dump their treated waste anywhere in Long Island Sound off Westchester if Assemblyman George Latimer State Sen. Suzy Oppenheimer have their way.

Latimer has just sponsored a bill calling for a ban on boats discharging their treated waste from Port Chester to New Rochelle and Pelham Manor. The bill is exactly the same as one Oppenheimer has sponsored in the Senate.

It would give Westchester County permission to require marinas to provide waste pumpout services, and would instruct the state Department of Environmental Conservation to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to designate the area as a no-discharge zone.

The EPA looks for certain criteria before it will set the no-discharge zone, notably that enough pumpout services are available.

Latimer took up the cause earlier this month while reading about Oppenheimer’s bill in The Journal News early this month, shortly after Connecticut and the EPA declared dumping off limits in the smaller state’s portion of Long Island Sound.

Michael Brown, a candidate for mayor in New Rochelle, also took note and said he plans to write to Gov. Eliot Spitzer in support of the idea. Brown is a Democrat running on the Republican line.

You can find Latimer’s bill here.

And Oppenheimer’s here.

New York City’s reservoirs, which spread across Westchester, Putnam and the Catskill Mountains, are part of the region’s landscape – providing wildlife habitat, picturesque views and, of course, drinking water. Most of Westchester and part of Putnam gets its drinking water from the city’s system, including the part of the Delaware Aqueduct that’s leaking in different spots in Orange and Ulster counties.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli today told the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to step up its plans to fix the leaks in order to avoid a catastrophe.

“The bridge collapse in Minneapolis and the steam pipe explosion in Manhattan are tragic reminders that we must repair and maintain our infrastructure. If the leaks in the tunnel lead to a complete collapse, New York would lose half its drinking water supply in an instant. DEP has to speed up plans to repair the tunnel, and it has to develop an emergency response plan in the event that the tunnel does collapse. Repairing the tunnel will be costly, but not as costly as shutting down half the City’s water supply,” he said as part of his audit report released today.

Pasted below is a TJN story about the city’s plan to fix the leaks.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

City:
State:
Section: NEWS
Page: 1A
From:
Source: STAFF
Edition: GWPR
Publication: The Journal News

New York City prepares to fix aqueduct

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was steering the country through World War II as drinking water began rushing through the Delaware Aqueduct. The last time someone climbed inside to inspect the tunnel supplying half of New York City’s water and much of Westchester County’s was as the Cold War was escalating.

Almost 50 years later, the city is preparing again to send workers and equipment deep into the Hudson Valley’s bedrock. Their mission will be to plug cracks in the concrete-lined tunnel through which up to 36 million gallons of water flows each day. But years of preparation, starting in the summer, come first – along with finding ways to keep the city’s water consumers fully supplied.

“Most people think of water as a given,” said Al Lopez, a deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The agency oversees the city’s almost 2,000-square-mile watershed, its 24 reservoirs, and some 400 miles of aqueducts and tunnels. Lopez is in charge of the Bureau of Engineering, Design and Construction. In total, he said, this project is as massive as any other undertaken by the city in its quest for water.

“They open the taps, and they expect water to come out,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can so we don’t change that attitude.”

Contractors will begin working where the Delaware Aqueduct crosses the Hudson River during its journey from the Catskill Mountains to the Kensico Reservoir in Valhalla. The work is a series of steps positioning the city to one day shut off the aqueduct and patch its leaks. But unlike closing your home’s main water valve for a few hours, you can’t just cut much of the water flowing to some 9 million people without somehow making up the difference.

“Currently, there is not sufficient supplemental water supply to NYC to allow any portion of the 85-mile Delaware Aqueduct to be taken out of service for an extended period of time,” according to the DEP’s report outlining its Tunnel and Shaft Rehabilitation Project. “Alternative water supply sources are being developed … however, these sources would not be available for a minimum of eight to 10 years.”

The rehabilitation is aimed at a 45-mile stretch from the outlet of the city’s Rondout Reservoir in the mountains to the West Branch Reservoir on the Kent-Carmel border. Six portals leading from the surface to the aqueduct will be improved. Some are scheduled for new electrical service or new monitoring instruments. New pumps will be placed in others or roads constructed around them. The goal is to have equipment and other measures in place for when the aqueduct needs to be drained and workers descend to make repairs – instead of rushing because of some emergency.

“This move makes sense, strategically. It recognizes the vulnerabilities of the system and attempts to get a head start on any remedial work that needs to be done down the line,” said Eric Goldstein, senior attorney for the Manhattan-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

The first step comes near the Dutchess County hamlet of Chelsea on the Hudson River, between Interstate 84 and Poughkeepsie. Others will follow, including a site in Putnam Valley off Route 301. But the shaft near Chelsea, which heads more than 600 feet underground, is the key to the project, the DEP’s Lopez said.

“Shaft 6 is the trigger, because it gives us the capability of dewatering the tunnel,” said Lopez, referring to the DEP’s plans to pump water out of the Delaware Aqueduct and into the Hudson River when the time comes to send in workers.

The leaks, which are on the west side of the Hudson River in Ulster and Orange counties, were first detected in 1990 and, according to the DEP, are not worsening. The DEP launched an AUV, or autonomous underwater vehicle, in 2003 to learn more about them. It floated through the 45-mile section, taking more than 160,000 digital photographs. Lopez said the mini-submersible is being readied for another run.

“There is no question we can do the repairs. It’s a question of looking at the cracks, deciding if you want to line it or fill it,” Lopez said.

If the aqueduct failed, said James Tierney, the watershed inspector general for state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the result would be “an absolute catastrophe.” People would have to leave parts of the city and Westchester, he said, because there would be no water for fighting fires, flushing toilets, cooking, etc.

“At least what we’re finding here is, the size of the leak isn’t growing,” Tierney said. “It means they have to do it (the repairs), but it gives them breathing room.”

The Shaft 6 work is expected to take four years and cost $239 million. Shutting down the Delaware Aqueduct, according to the DEP, wouldn’t occur before 2011, when the city’s Croton filtration plant is expected to be operating. The Croton System, which sprawls across northern Westchester and Putnam counties, would then be used more and could supply up to 290 million gallons of the city’s daily demand – compared to its contribution now of no more than 100 million.

On average, 600 million gallons flow through that stretch of aqueduct every day. Along with conservation, the city is considering “a range of options,” said Anne Canty, deputy commissioner for Intergovernmental Affairs and Communications, to make up the potential deficit. Canty said possibilities include storing excess water in the Magothy Aquifer, a layer of rock and sand beneath Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, and pumping it out when needed.

This is all part of the city’s Dependability Study – an effort to repair major components of its water system “and, yet ensure that there is a sufficient supply of drinking water” for consumers in the city and upstate.

“Everyone hopes that DEP is able to get control of this leak before things get more serious,” said Goldstein, of the NRDC. “You don’t want to be shopping for an umbrella when it’s pouring rain.”

Reach Michael Risinit at mrisinit@lohud.com or 845-228-2274.

The Bronx Zoo in 1981 named a baby elephant after Brooke Astor, the philanthropist and high-society figure who passed away on Monday. That’s included in Time magazine’s remembrance of her. The Wildlife Conservation Society, the zoo’s parent organization, remembers Astor, too.

Parents and teachers might be interested in this one. Summer is coming to an end and fall means bird migration. Audubon New York has an educational game on their Web site called Mission: Migration. It’s supposed to teach children about how the choices made around the home, neighborhood and school can affect migrating birds.

It’s a moth, it’s a hummingbird . . .

I have a butterfly bush in my yard that is always attracting, you guessed it, butterflies. It also draws in these guys (see video below) that somewhere, sometime, someone told me were called sphinx moths. They also seem to favor bee balm.

If you just see them zoom by out of the corner of your eye, you might think you saw a brown hummingbird. Apparently, one species of sphinx moth is referred to as a hummingbird moth. Who knew?

Download:

“Males, known as drones, perform no useful function except to mate. They are loutish and filthy, and the workers – sterile females – tolerate their presence for a few months a year, then systematically murder them.”

That was one sentence that jumped out at me in a recent New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert on honeybees and colony-collapse disorder. Much has been written in recent months on disappearing honeybees and how that might affect the world. This piece — pointed out by an avid Nature of Things reader — is entertaining as well as informative.

Honeybees, Kolbert says, will feed on almost anything that is blooming.

“This trait makes honeybees essential to modern agriculture, which has itself evolved to depend on their service,” she writes

Couldn’t help but notice the katydid perched on a post this week outside the Dunkin Donuts in Mount Kisco. These insects spend most of their time in the treetops and are usually heard but not seen. Click here for more about them.

Sorry the photo’s a bit on the blurry side but I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

Want to see some wild turkeys? Check out TJN photographer Peter Carr’s video of a whole mess of ‘em over in Rockland County.