Reservoirs of the Hudson Valley River in 2006 (4)

Click above to view graphic

My interest in the New York Reservoir System because with the climactic scene in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist which took place at the Croton Reservoir, a site now occupied by the main branch of The New York Public Library.  Later, when I was visiting a spa in Neversink, New York, we passed the reservoir there and the driver of the van said, “That’s where your water comes from.”  When I used to watch the local news, there was a period of drought in the late 80’s, which prompted the weatherman to tell the viewers what the levels in the reservoir were.  Finally, as a future library student, I geeked out when I visited the Queens Museum and saw this. 

However, in all candor, I chose this data set from NYC Data Gov because I felt it would be easy to work with while learning Tableau.  The data only runs from 2005 to 2010, but I focused (again, for the sake of managing the data) on only three years, and noticed that while the levels were pretty consistent through the three years being examined, there was a spike in the first quarter of 2006.

This led me to some sleuthing in the New York Times database, which told me that in mid-February 2006, the City had received 26.9 inches of snow (so presumably a little further up the Hudson Valley, the levels were higher).  Another article (“Floodwaters Reveal a Divide Between Upstate and Down,” 2/5/05), stated “the water in the Neversink Reservoir, now over 100 percent of capacity at a time that it’s usually around 80. When kept at a lower level, the reservoir, which is part of New York City’s water supply system, can help prevent or limit flooding, by giving water from swollen rivers a place to collect rather than cascading downstream. But keeping such reservoirs as full as possible maximizes the city’s ability to provide water downstate even in an extended dry spell.”  In other words, we in NYC are delighted when the reservoirs are completely full, because we are thirsty, but residents of the area closer to the reservoirs worry about flooding, and contamination of groundwater (if overflowing rivers have nowhere to go).

This town-mouse and country-mouse controversy seems to have died down because, as stated above, the data stops at 2010.  Either the sense of urgency regarding the reservoir levels, or budget constraints, cause the data to end there.

As you suggested, I looked up the longitude and latitude of each of the reservoir towns and dropped them into an excel spreadsheet, but I was unable to upload that onto Tableau.