Q. Describe what watershed protection programs are about.
Van Abs: Watershed protection programs in the Highlands focus on water quality, water supply, and the maintenance of ecosystems that are water-related, such as streams, wetlands, ponds and lakes. Also people's use of those resources. The idea is to try to allow for public uses without damaging the natural systems that we have. There are several kinds of successes you can have: sometimes it's a real success just to break a trend if things are going downhill quickly and you can break that trend and have them stabilized, that can be quite a success. Then there's restoration --we do have resources in the Highlands that have been damaged, and if we can bring them back to some sort of healthy level, that’s a success. A trout production stream where there once was no trout, that would certainly be a success here.

Q. How do you educate the public about key watershed issues?
Van Abs: I've been trying to help people understand the role of groundwater in water supply for decades now, and it isn’t easy. Groundwater is out of sight, out of mind. People don't tend to think about it. They see a reservoir, for instance; you can see whether that reservoir is high or low. You can see if a stream is high or low -- it's very easy to relate to surface water. Groundwater, you don't see it.

A friend was showing a planning director around New Jersey and the planning director finally said “I want to see the aquifer. I want to see the groundwater. Show me the groundwater.” And of course, you couldn't. Instead, what you tend to do is use graphic representations: if you have a sponge in a bucket and you fill the bucket up, you still don’t see the water, but it’s there. You give people that kind of metaphor to use.

Also in the Highlands, because they're so dependent on groundwater, people can relate to other people's wells. They do understand their wells. They do understand when it takes four hours to refill the storage tank in their basement when it used to take two hours to fill it. They do understand when they have to re-drill a well at 10,000 dollars cost, when the old well has gone dry. So for those people who haven't had those problems, they can at least relate to what their neighbors have seen.

Q. Why the concern over groundwater?
Van Abs: Groundwater is a critical resource in New Jersey, and certainly in the Highlands. Statewide it’s about half of the water supply, and in the Highlands it's even more. It's about ninety percent of the water supply to people who actually live in the Highlands. Surface water moves very quickly, and so if it doesn't rain for a while, it's gone. Groundwater is in storage, in the ground, in the crevices between rocks and so on. And so there's this whole reservoir that nobody had to build. It's just water that has seeped from the surface into what we would call groundwater or the aquifer. It's that water that keeps streams running during dry periods -- if it hasn’t rained for ten days and there's still water in the stream, that's groundwater that's come out to the surface. It's the groundwater that has supplied the wells, whether those are public wells or private wells for a single household. Groundwater is pretty fundamental. It's also the water that moves to wetlands, it keeps them wet during dry periods, so all the plants and animals that depend on those wetlands, groundwater is sustaining them. It's truly fundamental to how ecosystems in this state work.

Q. Describe the vulnerability factor within a watershed.
Van Abs: One thing that people don't recognize is how streams feed into one another. About half of the stream miles are streams that you can literally step over. They’re streams that have no other tributaries, they're the headwaters of the larger watershed. That's fifty percent of the stream miles and another twenty-five percent of the stream miles are the next set of streams, the ones that have a single tributary. These streams are very vulnerable to damage and they are the least-protected streams. They are the streams that tend to end up in a storm water detention basin. They are the streams that tend to be ditched, so the problem is they are the very top. So, if the very top is damaged, then that damage translates itself all the way down to a reservoir, or a major river. And once that top is damaged, its very hard to restore it, to bring it back. So, the protection of the headwaters is very very critical. Most people don't recognize that it is those little streams that people tend to regard as insignificant, … and they may actually be the most significant streams we have.

Q. What happens when surface water moves quickly through the watershed?
Van Abs: When you get a relatively small rainfall and what you see in a stream is an immediate and very large increase in the flow, and once that rain goes away, the flow stops, the stream goes very quickly to its pre-storm levels, that’s a “flashy” stream. A non-flashy stream is one where –after a rainfall -- most of the water is soaking into the ground or being held back in soil, and so the stream flow changes very slowly. That's a stream that’s a lot safer to build bridges over and build anything by, or to use for recreational purposes. A flashy stream is a stream that is going to react very quickly during rainfall.

Flashy streams have different kinds of impacts depending on where they are. There are some streams that are naturally flashy so they have built their banks to react to that kind of flashiness. They will tend to be fairly narrow kinds of streams and gorges of that sort. When you get a stream that wasn't naturally flashy and it’s become flashy because a lot of storm water has been put into it, then what you're going to get very quickly is the severe erosion of the stream banks. You get a lot of material moving in the stream, it gets a lot dirtier, and this is damaging to the stream ecosystem. If there’s a water supply downstream, it’s polluting that water supply with a lot of sediment, mud, turbidity, and debris.

Q. Why not just treat collected surface water?
Van Abs: There are water supply systems in the world that have paved over an area, creating a catch-basin area, and then they collect the water and they treat it and use it. If you go to Bermuda what you see is a lot of white roofs and every single one of those roofs is a collection area for water that runs to a cistern. Then they treat it and they use it within that house. So it has been done. There are two problems with that. One is that it is extremely expensive to do. Second, it has no relationship to ecosystem management. If you pave over a watershed so that you can collect all the water, then what you’re doing is destroying that ecosystem. It's not a stream anymore, it’s a gutter. And you're using that gutter as a pipeline to collect water. The other major problem with taking that approach is that it's removing one of the barriers to the pollution of a drinking water supply. In the drinking water field, we use a multi-barrier approach. Watershed protection is the first barrier; it's an easy way of keeping water supplies clean. The treatment is the second barrier, and then we chlorinate the water when we deliver it to customers, and that's the third barrier. So, that's three barriers. If you take one of those away, the water supply actually becomes more risky, more likely to transmit pollutants to a customer and that's what we don't want.

Q. What significant changes are occurring in the Highlands with respect to water supply?
Van Abs: Over the last 30 years, what we’re seeing in the Highlands is an increasing amount of development, and it’s happening faster and faster. The areas towards New York City have been developed by and large. There are relatively few spaces left for development. So development is pushing west along Route 80, west along Route 78, and northwest along Route 23. The other major issue is that it's not all happening in concentrated patterns. It's happening scatter-shot across the region. So, we're getting a lot of fragmentation -- forest fragmentation, and of farmland -- and the more that happens, the more damaged the system becomes. I liken it to somebody taking a squirt gun with paint, going up to a map, and squirting paint on a map: that's what the development pattern looks like in the Highlands as well as the rest of rural New Jersey. That's a pattern that is a real downhill skid for a natural resource.

If all we were talking about was a few houses here and there, and they weren't plopped right on top of a stream or an endangered species, then the Highlands could accommodate that, because it would be a small impact on a very large area. The problem is it isn’t a few houses here or there. It’s a few houses everywhere. And that's very different because it truly fragments forest systems, which has an impact on both water supply and the ecosystems themselves. You tend to get people wanting to be located right up against a stream, for example, and so they clear the banks of the stream and they get their lawn mower and they mow right down the stream. It's almost as if they can't feel that they've done a good job unless their lawnmower wheels get wet. Those kinds of things -- when multiplied by hundreds or thousands of scattered new homes around the Highlands -- have a big impact. And so that's really what the Highlands can’t tolerate. A little bit of additional development, if it's well-designed and we're doing restoration work at the same time, the Highlands probably can handle that. But not just scattered across the landscape, as if there was no natural resource there. As if everybody could do what they want to do, with no impact on the greater good.

Q. How does development affect water supply?
Van Abs: As part of the 2002 USDA Forest Service Study of the New York-New Jersey Highlands, the U.S. Geological Survey took a look at a number of different land use factors and the water quality in the region. What they do is they take a look at the actual amount of impervious surface and each one of the sub-watersheds in the Highlands. Each one of the areas are above monitoring stations that have been around for a long time. You need a number of years of records from the water quality monitoring stations, so these are stations with ten and fifteen and twenty years worth of water quality monitoring results. By comparing the two, you can determine whether or not impervious surface really is an issue within the area -- and it is. One of the things they saw -- which ties in with research we've seen all across the country -- is that the higher the impervious surface within a watershed, the lower the water quality is. Likewise, the lower the amount of forested land in a watershed, the lower water quality is. That's something they showed in the Highlands, which is very similar to national research.

Q. And how important is that water supply to the cities?
Van Abs: In 1996, the State of New Jersey completed a statewide water supply plan, and one of the things they looked at in both that study and a prior study was this: what other reservoir sites are available in the northern part of the state to provide for additional water supplies or replacement water supplies? And the answer is: there are none. They have used all the reservoir sites that are available in that area. So if the cities were to face a situation where one of the reservoirs were no longer usable, they would have a very tough time finding an alternate resource. It's entirely possible that their alternate supply would have to come from the Raritan River basin, but I think more immediately they would look toward water conservation, and even that would probably not replace the loss of a significant reservoir. I think what would happen more immediately is that the cities would have to treat their water much more stringently, at a fairly high cost.

Q. How did the cities come to depend on the Highlands for water?
Van Abs: Back about a hundred or so years ago, Newark used to get its water from the Passaic River. The Passaic was getting very polluted. Newark leaders were looking for an alternate supply and where they wound up getting their water was the Pequannock watershed in the Northern Highlands. It was very much like New York City getting its water supply out of the Catskills. Jersey City would eventually do the same thing and so on down the line. So you had all these series of reservoirs built in the Highlands, and essentially all the water surface water supply yield that's available in the Highlands is dedicated to the cities. So our entire northeast corridor along the Hudson River and the lower parts along Bergen County, Essex County, Union County, they are all supplied by Highlands reservoirs. So there is a very direct link between the cities and the Highlands, but it’s one that most of the people in the cities don't recognize.

The Highlands has become northern New Jersey's water supply for a couple of reasons. One is simply that it has ridges and valleys. People have been able to wall off those valleys with a dam and create a reservoir behind it. That's why we don’t have many reservoirs in south Jersey: it's flat. The second reason: at the time these reservoirs were created, the Highlands was quite undeveloped and so that land was relatively inexpensive. You had to remove very few people comparatively from the areas, so you could flood that valley with a reservoir. The Highlands are critical now for water supply because of history. All of those things were done decades ago, if not a century or more ago, and so we're in a situation where we have no alternatives. So, we have to protect those water supplies simply because we have no alternatives.

Q. Are there other examples of water supply protection that’s based on forest preservation?
Van Abs: Some cultures do protect their forested mountain areas. Other cultures have not and have learned the damage that can come from that. You hear in the Himalayas they've lost a lot of their forest cover because people have cut down their forest area for fuel. The result has been devastating floods, lots of damage from landslides, mudslides and so on, and now they're making a major effort to reforest those areas. In Europe, you tend to have a lot of forest protection. Some of that is simply for avalanche control, but some of it is for water protection as well. In our country, we've had any number of water supplies that have established controls on the loss of forest upstream of reservoirs because of water supply protection. New York City is a good example. The Adirondacks were saved in large part because people saw them as important to New York City's water supply, and so the forests in those areas were protected. The same thing out in California. Seattle has a wonderful forested reservoir watershed that they use to protect their water supply. So, this is something that is done elsewhere as well.

Q. Is the Highlands at a turning point?
Van Abs: The cities a hundred years ago -- even as much as two hundred years ago -- knew that they wanted to supply their people with water that was clean, and the only place you could get clean water was away. Somewhere out in the hinterlands, and the Highlands were our hinterlands. When you come right down to it, they no longer are. They're part of suburbia, more and more. And so you’re getting this conflict between a desire to have your water supply out in this hinterlands area, this pristine area, and people's desire to be part of that area also. So now were getting this conflict between the two.

The Highlands has seen a big shift in terms of how people perceive it and how they use it. Years back, it was used for forestry, mining and agriculture. These are all natural resource-based industries, and so you tended to have people scattered across the land in farmhouses and so on, or concentrated in very small towns within the Highlands area. Of course the farmers gravitated to those towns. Now what you see is instead a use of the Highlands for suburban commuters. They live in the Highlands, but they're not related to the Highlands economically. They commute out of the Highlands to go to their jobs, and go back to the Highlands to live. It's a very different kind of land use and has a very different impact on the Highlands as well. We have seen damages to the Highlands in the past from prior land uses: when you cut over an entire mountain full of forest, that does a lot damage. But as the twentieth century began and progressed, we were getting reforestation. Now what we're doing is seeing some of the land coming back to forests that weren't. And some of the land that is forest is going to non-forested uses, like suburban developments.

Q. How are the Spruce Run and Round Valley reservoirs different from reservoirs to the north?
Van Abs: Spruce Run and Round Valley reservoirs were both built in the 1960s when the State of New Jersey recognized that the Raritan basin didn't have enough water supply to support all the people that were in the basin at the time, much less all the people to come. These reservoirs were built with a different purpose than the north Jersey reservoirs. The north Jersey reservoirs either are directly tapped for water supply -- there's actually a pipeline coming out of them to a treatment plant -- or they provide flow down to a reservoir that is directly tapped for water supply. That's not true for Round Valley and Spruce Run reservoirs. There's no pipeline coming out of them to a water supply treatment center that then delivers to customers. Instead we use the Raritan River as the main supply, but augment the flow of that river whenever it's dry by releasing from either Spruce Run or Round Valley. That water then flows 19 miles downstream before it's actually taken out and used as a public water supply system. So, as a system the river and the reservoirs are an integrated water supply. In north Jersey it's more of a direct reliance on reservoirs themselves.

Q. Describe the Spruce Run Initiative.
Van Abs: Several years ago the New Jersey Water Supply Authority started to get involved in water supply management. When we started doing that we were working at a very regional scale, but a municipality local to the Spruce Run reservoir asked us for assistance in master plan work they were doing. That request led us to an idea and that idea is the Spruce Run Initiative. It's a coalition or working group of five municipalities around the Spruce Run reservoir, and we've essentially agreed that we all want the reservoir to maintain its current quality or get better … to at least have no further damage to the streams and if possible increase in quality and stability. With that as a basis we've started developing a number of projects on land acquisition, storm water management, stream restoration, education of home owners with regard to maintenance on their septic systems ... a wide variety of issues that are both beneficial to the municipality and are beneficial to the authority and its customers through the Spruce Run reservoir. Our big focus is to have these kinds of activities that is a win for both sides, so that nobody feels like anyone's imposing on them. All of the Spruce Run municipalities are fairly small in size, 5-6,000 people or less, and their tax bases are not enormous. We are able to provide some ideas, some information, some expertise that they would generally not come by themselves. It just wouldn’t' be cost effective for them. If we do something for five municipalities or an entire area of the Raritan basin, we can provide that information at no cost essentially. They wouldn't be able to do that because the cost to do that for one municipality would be prohibitive. So, that’s one of the major benefits that we bring to the municipality: a source of information they couldn't get themselves.

Q. What’s happening with the Highlands’ own groundwater supplies?
Van Abs: Groundwater is definitely a finite resource within the Highlands and we're seeing some trends that I would consider alarming. I've looked at thousands of well records and the deepest of those wells were -- for a single family home -- four hundred feet, five hundred feet, something like that. Now we're routinely seeing wells that are seven hundred feet, maybe nine hundred feet deep, to supply a single house with water. That tells me we're really starting to stretch the limits as to what we can get in groundwater supply from the Highlands. We're also likely putting homes in places that really don't make a lot of sense from a water supply perspective. There's not a lot of water to get if you have a home that's on top of a ridge, because the water's all that much further down. The more we take water from the system, the more damage we can do to the surface water ecosystems and to the neighbors. Water from one well may have been used for somebody else's well.

The groundwater situation is being paid attention to by more and more municipalities and this is a good trend, this is a positive trend. More and more towns are hiring professionals to help them understand just how much groundwater is available in their towns and how many people can fit in these towns without damaging the resource, without over stressing those groundwater systems. They then change their zoning to be sustainable from a groundwater perspective, both groundwater supply and also groundwater quality because these municipalities primarily use septic systems with individual homes. You have to be concerned from a quality perspective as well. If more towns could take this kind of approach, where they predetermine their sustainable capacity and then zone and plan accordingly, we'd be in a lot better shape in the long run.

Q. Did the drought in New Jersey, 2002, stimulate water supply awareness?
Van Abs: The drought that we experienced from 1999 throughout 2002 was an interesting wake-up call in a lot of different ways. A lot of domestic wells went dry, and so people had to re-drill those wells and some of those were fairly deep wells. They weren’t those shallow wells that you would expect to go dry. We really drew some of those reservoir systems in the Highlands down to amazingly and alarmingly low levels. People involved with water supply are paying a lot of attention to it, trying to figure out what to do. As for the general public, the droughts we've been through in the past indicate very clearly that people have a fairly short attention span. The years following the 1999-2000 drought was a very wet year, and what you see is more lawn sprinkling systems going in and less attention paid to water conservation legislation, and a lot of proposals start lagging, and are not going anywhere. This is a standard approach. I've been through quite a number of droughts in New Jersey and it’s fairly routine. The 1980-81 drought was a very bad drought, but by 1983 people weren't paying a lot of attention to the issue anymore.

Q. Are the Highlands nationally significant?
Van Abs: In terms of national significance, the Highlands would have a hard time competing with an area like the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the Catskills, and yet it is very important and I think it does have a national relevance. The Highlands has been an issue since the Regional Plan Association of New York City developed its first regional plan in the 1920s and saw the Highlands as a critical green space around New York City. New York City is the financial capital of this country -- some say the world -- so anything that is that relative to New York City is relative nationally. I think that's really where the Highlands gets its focus. If this were out in the middle of some relatively unpopulated area, it would get a lot less national attention. It is where it is; it’s important to one of the nation's preeminent urban concentrations; and for that reason it has national importance.

Q. Do people think about where their water supply comes from?
Van Abs: Years ago I did a training program for teachers on water resource issues -- many of which were northeast urban district teachers -- and I asked them, where did the water supply come from for their towns, for their schools? And most of them did not have a clue. They did not know where their water supply came from. I think that’s true for most of the public: the water supply comes from the tap. And it comes from the water company, if they get a bill from the water company. Some people do, some people don't. So, there isn't that close connection between the folks who live in the cities and the folks that live in the Highlands. And yet, I'm not sure that it's absolutely critical that that link occur. People that live in north Jersey in the 1970s were very supportive of protection of the Pinelands, you’ll find people very concerned about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and yet that isn't where their water supply comes from. You can find reasons to connect with an area even if they don’t know that it’s also the source of their water supply. Certainly if they knew that their water supply came from there, they'd probably be even more concerned.

Q. Do you have a personal connection to the Highlands?
Van Abs: I’m definitely a mountain person. I am from New Jersey, and yet I almost never go to the New Jersey shore. I like going to the mountains. I like going to the hills. I used to go to scout camp in the Highlands. I used to have friends in the Highlands areas and go out there. I used to work in north Jersey for the Passaic River Coalition. A big chunk of that basin is in the Highlands and so I tended to spend a fair amount of time up there. The Highlands is a very beautiful place, I like visiting it. Because I was a neighbor when I was a kid, and then through my professional work, I've developed a strong affinity for the Highlands and now here I am at the Water Supply Authority with two reservoirs that are entirely dependent on the New Jersey Highlands for their supply. Now I have a close, professional reason for paying attention.

Q. What do you see as the future of the Highlands?
Van Abs: Sometimes its very hard to visualize what the Highlands should look like. Everyone will come at it from a different perspective. We have a lot of existing damage in the Highlands that needs to be restored. That’s going to take a lot of care, a lot of people being involved in stream restoration and things like that. From a development pattern perspective, we can't undo the suburban sprawl type development that has happened in the Highlands already. But we can certainly redirect some of what could happen in the future. We need to make sure that we protect the most critical resources in the Highlands. We need to make sure that what areas we don’t protect through preservation are treated very carefully, very delicately. It's a design issue. It's an issue with regard to understanding the landscape, and so I think one of the most critical things I would hope for is that people who work with the Highlands, who work in the Highlands, who do things with Highlands’ lands, do so in context. That they understand the impacts of their actions on that landscape, and they do what they can to avoid damaging them.

Q. There’s a long history of human impact on the Highlands. Where will it lead?
Van Abs: Reading the old accounts, when the original colonists came to this country -- not just New Jersey, but this country -- one of the things that they saw that absolutely over-awed them was trees. Thousands upon thousands of square miles of trees. They promptly set about cutting them down, and using them. Then using the land below them for farmlands, using the trees themselves to build towns, ships, and using them for charcoal. There’s almost no part of New Jersey that hasn't been cut at least once, including the entire Highlands. There's no part of the Highlands to my knowledge that wasn't cut at least once. So the forests that we're seeing are really re-growth. It’s the forests coming back. There's no part of the Highlands that is pristine.

The question is always going to be: what does society want from the Highlands? If it wants natural resources, well a lot of those natural resources are coming back and are actually looking to be in pretty good shape. We have a lot of trout production streams, a lot of threatened and endangered species that are finding good homes in the Highlands. If we want to keep that we can, but it will take time, effort, political will, money … all of those kinds of things. I think it's critical to recognize that that Highlands will always be a managed resource. We're always going to be doing things with it. We've always been doing things with it, whether its for water supply or some other purpose. After all there were wooded valleys, where the reservoirs now exist. Those wooded valleys are no more. We decided that that was appropriate, so there they are. We have to make sure that we know what we want from the Highlands. There's an old phrase that I like to use: “if you don't know where we're going, all roads will take you there.” Once we know where we're going, we can figure out how to get there. But if we don't know where we're going, no map will show us.