Spring 2010 Seminar Series

DATE: March 4th
LOCATION: E51-376
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC Conference Room, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Peter Kolesar

TITLE
Conflict on the Delaware: Trout Fisherman and River Towns versus the Big Apple: Improving Water Release Policies with Operations Research

ABSTRACT
The Delaware River is the source of half of New York City's drinking water, is a unique habitat for wild trout and has suffered three 100 year floods in the last five years. The rules governing water releases from the three New York City dams at the Delaware's headwaters in the Catskill Mountains impact the reliability of New York's water supply, the potential for flood damage in the River valley and the quality of the aquatic habitat. The traditional rules, which are dictated in part by Supreme Court decree, expired in May of 2007 and the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and New York City all held veto power over any changes. We describe an operations research driven research project, undertaken on behalf of a conservation coalition that aimed to revise the release policies to benefit the fishery while not increasing the City's drought risk. We discuss both the analyses and the politics that led to the October 2007 adoption of our optimization based "Adaptive Release" framework by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) and New York City. The project illustrates the effectiveness of basic OR methodology including statistically designed experiments, discrete event simulation, regression modeling, quadratic programming and cost benefit analysis. The new rules, called the Flexible Flow Management Program, provide a 200% increase in trout and shad habitat at no appreciable increase in risk to the City. They are conservative in that they decrease reservoir levels less in dry years then in wet years, thereby offering modest increases in flood protection during the early fall hurricane season, and are much simpler to administer. Estimated economic benefits due to increased fishing and boating are above $150 million. The research continues to have impact on future policy. The New York State and Pennsylvania fisheries commissions have recently espoused our proposals for an 'augmented' release policy keyed to estimates of New York's actual water consumption that could increase both habitat and flood mitigation further., but remains 'outside the box' of New York City's current thinking. The impact of water releases on the federally endangered dwarf wedge mussel, which has colonies in the upper Delaware, is a new constraint and a lever that conservationists seek to exploit.