The best way to ensure clean, safe drinking water is to protect it at the source.

Riverkeeper advocates for a range of state policies — new laws, improved regulations and new programs — to improve protections for drinking water supplies statewide. These include efforts to restrict the use and discharges of toxic chemicals, reduce excess road salt and nutrients, protect wetlands and small streams, ensure that farms use best management practices to reduce downstream impacts, and conserve more open space so that the environment can naturally clean water supplies. We lobby for stronger water quality standards that apply to tap water and as well as our streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Riverkeeper helped establish NYS DEC’s Drinking Water Source Protection Program — which helps communities analyze sources of pollution and protect their drinking water — and we work to ensure that it is effectively implemented. We are also focused on strengthening the use of Watershed Rules and Regulations, a nearly 150-year-old state law that provides downstream communities with some authority to protect their water sources in upstream communities.

Most larger communities, including those burdened by environmental injustices, rely on water sources far outside their jurisdiction, leaving them with little or no power to effectively protect their water sources from contamination. Effective state policies are essential to protect these water sources, as are local partnerships ensuring that upstream communities with decision-making power over land use help protect the water that downstream communities rely on. Riverkeeper partners with some of the region’s largest cities to ensure that drinking water sources are effectively protected. We helped develop first-ever drinking water source protection plans for Peekskill and Ossining, and we continue to collaborate closely with these and other communities to work through local issues and connect those issues to our state policy advocacy. Our local partnerships inform our policy advocacy so that the policies we lobby in support of are addressing local priorities.

Many of the threats to drinking water come from a “death by a thousand cuts” — the cumulative impact of decisions made over decades that reduce the capacity of the landscape to naturally degrade and remove pollutants from water. But sometimes the threat comes from a hazardous waste site. In these cases, Riverkeeper pushes for proper cleanup and remediation of contamination.

When Newburgh discovered its drinking water source had been contaminated with PFAS (dangerous “forever chemicals”) stemming from the use of firefighting foam at the nearby Stewart Air National Guard Base, we worked with the city, residents and state agencies to ensure that tap water is delivered from an alternate drinking water source that is free of PFAS, that the source of contamination is cleaned up as thoroughly and quickly as possible, and that the city’s local water sources have better long-term protections.

In 2018, Riverkeeper and local leaders launched the Hudson River Intermunicipal Drinking Water Council — known as the “Hudson 7” — for the seven communities that depend on the Hudson as their source of public drinking water. The council represents 100,000 people who rely on the river after filtration and treatment, and this visionary collaborative has changed the paradigm for a range of protection, management, and remedial programs that affect the Hudson River and its vast watershed.

Riverkeeper works to ensure that science drives decision making. We advocate for new and stronger water quality standards to protect human health, develop sampling plans and gather data to understand conditions and trends in drinking water sources, and focus attention on emerging threats and impacts from climate change. In Peekskill Hollow Brook, a Hudson River tributary that is a source of drinking water for 100,000 people in northern Westchester County, Riverkeeper is working with Peekskill to update the state water quality assessment, an important foundation for enforcing the Clean Water Act. We’re also working with Peekskill and the Hudson 7 to develop long-term drinking water source monitoring priorities. Riverkeeper is at the cutting edge of science communication, bringing needed awareness to the emerging risks to drinking water quality that will come from climate change. Increased water temperatures and extremes of rain and drought will put new stresses on water supplies, highlighting the need to reduce existing pollution sources and enhance source water protections to boost community resilience and adapt to changing conditions.