Long Island's Secret Stash - The Lloyd Aquifer

By Eileen Lehpamer

Did you know that Long Island has a "secret stash" of clean drinking water?  Really clean.

Rain water that is thousands of years old.

And it's under your feet. Well, not right under your feet.

Depending on where you live, it's either 500 feet underground, or 2-thousand feet underground.

Check it out: It's the Lloyd Aquifer.

Sounds prestigious, right? But it's basically a layer of the earth that is made up of water-bearing sand and gravel.

It 's like a tri-layer cake. The deepest layer - the Lloyd Aquifer - is sandwiched between the bedrock and a layer of clay.

There are only about 40 pumps that are currently allowed to drill into the Lloyd Aquifer and suck out the water. That's only 10-percent of all the water pumps on Long Island. Long Beach, for example, gets all it's drinking water from the Lloyd Aquifer because the other layers contain too much salt water.

The 90-percent of other water pumps take their water from the Upper Glacial or the Magothy Aquifer, which is separated from the Lloyd Aquifer by a think layer of clay. Water there is about 50 to 70 years old. This is probably the tap water you a drinking.

Make you think, huh?

I knew next to NONE of this when I started my story today. I got a crash course in it from Robert Santoriello, the Superintendent of the Greenlawn Water District.

He took me to one of their pump houses so I could see what a water pump looked like and get video of it for our story. Greenlawn, like most municipalities on the Island, is NOT allowed to tap into the Lloyd Aquifer.

As State Senator Carl Marcellino described it today, it's like "Long Island's safety bank account". For an emergency, or like in the case of Long Beach.

In fact, the Suffolk County Water Authority was recently barred from tapping into the Lloyd Aquifer.

So, now Governor Paterson has until Friday to sign a bill that bans New York City from pumping and storing some of the city's water in the Lloyd Aquifer. Here's diagram to give you an idea of what the city wants to do.

So what do you think?

Makes you wonder where your bottled water REALLY comes from.

Comments

[Eileen Lehpamer]

UPDATE:

John, thanks for your comment. Yes, part of the Lloyd Aquifer is under Queens.

Governor Paterson signed the ban prohibiting the City's plan.

[John]

I seem to be missing something obvious: What makes Bloomberg's team think that they have a right to the space, if it's just under Long Island? Last I checked, Nassau and Suffolk aren't on New York City land, after all.

I mean, really, what I think depends on whether they have a legal right to do it, not whether our local representatives can make it sound scary.