Conflict on the Delaware – Trout Fishermen and River Towns versus the Big Apple: Improving Water Release Policies with OR
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Date: 10-07-2008
Start Time:
1:00pm
End Time: 2:00pm
Speaker: Peter Kolesar, Business School: Columbia University
Location: Uris 333
ABSTRACT
The Delaware River is both the source of half of New York City’s drinking water and a unique habitat for wild trout – and the river has experienced three 100 year floods in the last five years. The water release rules from the three New York City dams at the Delaware’s headwaters impact the reliability of New York’s water supply, the potential for flood damage and the quality of the aquatic habitat. The traditional rules - which are dictated in part by a 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 to the release rules.
We describe an OR driven project undertaken by a conservation coalition that aimed to revise the release policies to benefit the fishery while not increasing the City's drought risk. We describe both the analyses and the politics that led to the interim adoption of our OR based “Adaptive Release” framework by the Delaware River Commission and New York City. The new rules provide increases 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, offer modest increases in flood protection during the early fall hurricane season and are much simpler to administer.
The interim implementation employs release quantities that are less that those called for by the conservationists and the flood imperiled river communities. They are currently under review and intense public scrutiny The conservation coalition has devised an ‘augmented’ policy that would increase both habitat and flood mitigation further, but would be ‘outside the box’ of New York City’s thinking. We will discuss both the complex political environment and the computer modeling that underlies the analysis.
BIO
Peter J. Kolesar is Professor Emeritus at the Columbia Business School and the Research Director of the Deming Center for Quality Management. Professor Kolesar has been on the on technical staffs of Procter and Gamble, the RAND Corporation and Bell Labs and on the faculties of the Imperial College of Technology, London, the Université de Montréal, and the City University of New York. He has won numerous awards for his path breaking research on the deployment of police and fire fighting forces. Much of this work has been implemented in cities around the US. Professor Kolesar is the author of some 50 technical papers spanning many areas of operations management and applied mathematics. Over the last decade, Peter Kolesar’s dominant interest has been to increase the effectiveness of quality and productivity management implementation in US industry. He is an active consultant to industry and government. Peter Kolesar is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. Peter Kolesar has been the Chairman of the Board of the Montana Fly Company LLC, a Director of the Juran institute and President of the Montgomery Lake Association. He is a dedicated classical guitarist and an avid fly fisherman. While an undergraduate, he captained the Columbia University water polo team.