Pesticides in the Watershed
The New York City Watershed MOA provides for a Pesticide and Fertilizer Working Group to "analyze the State’s current regulations and standards on storage, use and application of pesticides and fertilizers, and to recommend any changes to such regulations and standards to protect the City’s water supply from potential contamination from pesticides or fertilizers or to enhance the City’s ability to monitor any impacts from such storage, use or application."
In February 2000, after the Working Group released a final draft of their report, NYPIRG worked with other environmental groups to voice their concern over the level of success in addressing pesticide and fertilizer management within the watershed. In particular, the report failed to offer a comprehensive strategy to achieve the reduction and eventual elimination of pesticides and fertilizers in the fragile New York City watershed. Pesticides and fertilizers pose real health risks such as cancer, nervous system damage, development and reproductive abnormalities, hormone disruption, and immune suppression. Given that they travel many different paths once released into the environment, through both spray drift and volatilization, pesticides can move through the air and end up in water or soil. Pesticides and fertilizers also run off and flow into nearby bodies of surface water, or seep through to lower soil layers and eventually into groundwater. All of which threaten water quality. NYPIRG will continue to work to ensure that more effective measures are taken.
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