The owner of the eponymously named Manitoba’s bar on Avenue B isn’t sitting quietly after being so rudely shushed by upstairs neighbors to the tune of $6,400 in fines.

On March 27, Mr. Manitoba and his lawyer are scheduled to appear before the city’s Environmental Control Board to challenge two recent noise citations, which forced the former rock singer turned tavern operator to pull the plug on his bar’s popular live-music night.

Depending on the outcome of that hearing, the onetime front man of the proto-punk band the Dictators might further thrust the dispute into the mosh pit of Manhattan Civil Court.

“Right now, my attitude is: The battle is lost, but the war rages on,” said Mr. Manitoba, who recently signed a new 10-year lease at 99 Avenue B.

The 53-year-old entrepreneur, born Richard Blum, has sued over far less serious threats to his rockin’ livelihood. In 2004, he reportedly smacked another musician with a federal lawsuit for performing under the trademarked name “Manitoba,” a brand seemingly infringed by every map of Canada.

The noise issue poses a more present danger to the bar. Without the bands, the bar has done rather lousy business, Mr. Manitoba said. “If you take my last night of live music—what I grossed—I haven’t made that much in the past three weeks added up.”

Until last month, live music had always been an integral component to Mr. Manitoba’s boozy juke joint. When the bar first opened almost a decade ago, the venue scheduled performers virtually every night of the week.

In recent years, however, the bar has dramatically scaled back on the level of live entertainment, on account of changing neighborhood sentiment toward loud music—er, any noise in general. According to a New York Post report last summer, the densely liquor-licensed East Village and Lower East Side area generates the second-highest number of noise complaints citywide.

“Because of the way the neighborhood has changed, it’s a very tough thing to get away with live music seven days a week,” Mr. Manitoba said.

Portraying himself as a good neighbor, an East Village resident living just a few blocks away from the bar, and even an occasional attendee at local community-board meetings, Mr. Manitoba said he’s tried to appease neighborhood sensibilities by limiting live music at Manitoba’s to a single night a week, for a period of two to three hours, ending at 10 p.m. sharp.

“It was basically the last-gasp effort of keeping some sort of vestige of live music,” he said, “because you can’t go much earlier than that. And then you can’t really go much later than that. It’s just a different neighborhood.”

In recent years, some new neighbors whom Mr. Manitoba has never met moved into the co-op building above the bar. Though other upstairs residents sometimes hang out at Manitoba’s—according to the bar owner, one apartment dweller sometimes even performs—complaints about the Monday-night jam sessions seemed to coincide with the arrival of the newcomers, he said.

Since 2002, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection has received a total of eight noise complaints at Manitoba’s address. The past two inspections resulted in citations.

On Oct. 23, 2006, a D.E.P. officer measured the music coming from Manitoba’s as reaching 53 decibels in an upstairs apartment—roughly equivalent to the sound of moderate rainfall, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, yet still exceeding the city’s legal 45-decibel threshold.

More recently, on Feb. 12, the bands’ volume from above reached 65 decibels, according to the D.E.P.—a level of sound falling somewhere between a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner.

Slapped with two “very expensive” tickets, Mr. Manitoba said he had no choice but to call off live-music nights for the indefinite future.

“As a survival method, I just cut the music immediately,” he said. “If I get a multiple batch of tickets, I basically have to close down my business.”

The subsequent downturn in booze revenues has prompted the embattled operator to at least think about seeking damages. Mr. Manitoba told Counter Espionage that he was determined to fight a system in which “a neighbor can cripple a legal business with a phone call.”

A message posted on the bar’s MySpace page last month indicated that the bar was gathering information from bands who had performed at Manitoba’s dating back to September 2006 to calculate potential financial losses caused by “a neighbor couple that seems to have ignored the fact they purchased their apartment at an extremely low price because they live directly above a Rock N Roll bar that features live music!!”

Not to mention the rather noisy neighborhood surrounding the bar.

When D.E.P. officials take noise measurements of potentially offending businesses, they also take separate readings of the ambient sound around it.

At last reading, the background noise above Manitoba’s—minus the live music—reached 43 decibels, just two shy of the legal-infraction level unto itself.

The East 50's Neighborhood Coalition has filed for a preliminary injunction against the Department of Environmental Protection's planned Shaft 33B, at 59th Street and First Avenue, which would connect water mains to Water Tunnel No. 3, the city's 50-year, $6 billion infrastructure project.

The coalition contends that an alternate site between 55th and 56th streets on Third Avenue would be a better location for the shaft as it is directly over the water main trunk, obviating the need for further work that would disrupt the neighborhood. "We want [the D.E.P.] to look again at the site at 919 Third Avenue, which our engineers tell us is a viable site directly over the water mains," said Linda Saputelli, the chair of the coalition.

The coalition contends that:

The coalition has been battling the D.E.P. over this issue since late last year; the D.E.P. originally wanted to get started on the excavation next spring, with a completing date sometime by 2010. Construction of the connecting water mains would begin concurrently and and finish up by 2011.

-Matthew Grace

The Department of Environmental Protection, along with the Department of Design and Construction, is currently scoping out sites for the location of Shaft 33B, the latest infrastructure project for the long-awaited Water Tunnel No. 3, the 50-year, $6 billion project to update the city’s water system. But residents in the East 50’s are alarmed that the excavation, tentatively planned for the northwest corner of First Avenue and 59th Street, will disrupt their lives for the years it takes to complete the project.

Community Board 6, in response to these worries, passed a resolution last Wednesday that objected to the selection of any location for Shaft 33B by the D.E.P. “without a consolidated presentation of both the proposed location of 33B and the complete routing plans of the associated water mains … and full community participation in the decision of the routing of those mains.”

At a public hearing on Dec. 5 at the High School of Art and Design, nearly a thousand people packed the auditorium to oppose the D.E.P. plan, and the board’s resolution is another salvo in the ongoing contretemps that threatens to disrupt the project. At the heart of the matter isn’t so much the location of the shaft (although some people are opposed to that), but rather the location of the water mains that will connect the shaft to Water Tunnel No. 3 under Third Avenue.

The D.E.P. is responsible for the location, design and construction of both the water tunnel and Shaft 33B, but the D.D.C. is responsible for the water mains that will connect the two—and that’s where the problems begin. Once the D.E.P. makes a decision where the shaft will be excavated, then the D.D.C. will decide where the water mains should run. And in Manhattan, ripping up the streets to install those water mains will have an enormously detrimental impact on the neighborhood involved, project opponents say.

“We’re opposed to it because they will not tell us the water-main route,” said Linda Saputelli, the chair of the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition. According to Ms. Saputelli, the site for the water shaft shouldn’t be finalized until the D.D.C. makes public exactly where the water mains will run, how long the construction will last and how the neighborhood will be affected. Ms. Saputelli said that if work on Shaft 33B is approved, the water-mains component of the project will be a fait accompli, without any public oversight of a project that could adversely affect the neighborhood for years to come.

State Assemblyman Jonathan Bing has been working with the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition to demand answers from the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. “Right now, the big issue is trying to make sure the entire project—both the water shaft and the water main—are viewed as one project,” Mr. Bing told The Observer.

According to the D.E.P., excavation of Shaft 33B could begin as early as the spring of next year and would continue until 2010. Construction of the water mains would begin concurrently and continue after the shaft is completed, finishing up sometime in 2011.

The D.E.P. has released a draft version of the environmental-impact statement for Shaft 33B, and comments were accepted until Dec. 22. The department will now finalize the environmental-impact statement, and responses to comments will be incorporated into the final document.

Ms. Saputelli told The Observer that she is currently contacting elected officials with her group’s concerns to force the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. to open up their selection process for water-main routes. A lawsuit to stop the project is possible, Ms. Saputelli said, if the city continues with the project without community input.

And she has support. “If the D.E.P. does not adequately provide information to the community about why this site has been chosen and why other sites weren’t chosen—and, more specifically, how the water shaft is going to be connected to the main water tunnel—certainly I would support efforts to gather that information, up to and including a lawsuit,” Assemblyman Bing said.

Calls to the D.D.C. were referred to the D.E.P. Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the D.E.P., said: “We’ve been very open to the with the community and Community Board 6. We’re not concealing any information from them …. We’ve done more outreach on this site than any other shaft site related to Water Tunnel No. 3.”

Downtown Barhoppers Beware

In its ongoing battle to curb bar noise and the proliferation of nightclubs within its district, Community Board 3, on Dec. 20, passed a resolution supporting Assemblywoman Deborah Glick’s Dec. 12 letter to Governor George Pataki requesting that the recently vacated commissioner’s position in the State Liquor Authority be filled by a New York City resident.

In November 2005, S.L.A. chairman Edward F. Kelly announced his retirement after a decade with the authority, shortly after State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into pricing practices in the state liquor industry. A week before, Mr. Pataki had announced the creation of a chief executive post with the S.L.A. to run its day-to-day operations.

A spokesperson for the Governor wouldn’t comment on the selection of the new commissioner, saying only that “the Governor always looks for the most qualified and capable individuals when making appointments.” Joshua Toas, a former Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Counsel to the Governor (and frequent contributor to Mr. Pataki’s campaign fund), was appointed to the chief executive position of the S.L.A. shortly after it was created.

Critics of the S.L.A. have long said that the authority ignores community input when granting new liquor licenses in New York City, especially in the bar-saturated neighborhoods of the East and West Village and Chelsea. The three neighborhoods have the greatest number of liquor licenses in the city (3,055, 1,866 and 944, respectively), according to a 2005 report prepared by the office of then–City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

Because the commissioners of the S.L.A. all live outside the city, critics contend that the S.L.A. is unaware of the acute noise problems and disruption to the community that this proliferation of bars causes. Lately, Board 3 conducted a public hearing to discuss the feasibility of converting Avenue B into a one-way street. Proponents contend that the change would ameliorate traffic noise on the busy weekend nights, but others are concerned that it would irrevocably alter the character of the neighborhood. Other groups have called for a complete moratorium on new liquor licenses for certain neighborhoods in the city.

“We are looking for greater sensitivity from the S.L.A. regarding the impact of granting the large number of licenses in a concentrated area,” Ms. Glick told The Observer. “I think that commissioners that infrequently visit the city—who may not come into some of the downtown areas—they may not have a full understanding of how many people live in the area, and in what proximity to these establishments they live.”

The Department of Environmental Protection, along with the Department of Design and Construction, is currently scoping out sites for the location of Shaft 33B, the latest infrastructure project for the long-awaited Water Tunnel No. 3, the 50-year, $6 billion project to update the city’s water system. But residents in the East 50’s are alarmed that the excavation, tentatively planned for the northwest corner of First Avenue and 59th Street, will disrupt their lives for the years it takes to complete the project.

Community Board 6, in response to these worries, passed a resolution last Wednesday that objected to the selection of any location for Shaft 33B by the D.E.P. “without a consolidated presentation of both the proposed location of 33B and the complete routing plans of the associated water mains … and full community participation in the decision of the routing of those mains.”

At a public hearing on Dec. 5 at the High School of Art and Design, nearly a thousand people packed the auditorium to oppose the D.E.P. plan, and the board’s resolution is another salvo in the ongoing contretemps that threatens to disrupt the project. At the heart of the matter isn’t so much the location of the shaft (although some people are opposed to that), but rather the location of the water mains that will connect the shaft to Water Tunnel No. 3 under Third Avenue.

The D.E.P. is responsible for the location, design and construction of both the water tunnel and Shaft 33B, but the D.D.C. is responsible for the water mains that will connect the two—and that’s where the problems begin. Once the D.E.P. makes a decision where the shaft will be excavated, then the D.D.C. will decide where the water mains should run. And in Manhattan, ripping up the streets to install those water mains will have an enormously detrimental impact on the neighborhood involved, project opponents say.

“We’re opposed to it because they will not tell us the water-main route,” said Linda Saputelli, the chair of the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition. According to Ms. Saputelli, the site for the water shaft shouldn’t be finalized until the D.D.C. makes public exactly where the water mains will run, how long the construction will last and how the neighborhood will be affected. Ms. Saputelli said that if work on Shaft 33B is approved, the water-mains component of the project will be a fait accompli, without any public oversight of a project that could adversely affect the neighborhood for years to come.

State Assemblyman Jonathan Bing has been working with the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition to demand answers from the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. “Right now, the big issue is trying to make sure the entire project—both the water shaft and the water main—are viewed as one project,” Mr. Bing told The Observer.

According to the D.E.P., excavation of Shaft 33B could begin as early as the spring of next year and would continue until 2010. Construction of the water mains would begin concurrently and continue after the shaft is completed, finishing up sometime in 2011.

The D.E.P. has released a draft version of the environmental-impact statement for Shaft 33B, and comments were accepted until Dec. 22. The department will now finalize the environmental-impact statement, and responses to comments will be incorporated into the final document.

Ms. Saputelli told The Observer that she is currently contacting elected officials with her group’s concerns to force the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. to open up their selection process for water-main routes. A lawsuit to stop the project is possible, Ms. Saputelli said, if the city continues with the project without community input.

And she has support. “If the D.E.P. does not adequately provide information to the community about why this site has been chosen and why other sites weren’t chosen—and, more specifically, how the water shaft is going to be connected to the main water tunnel—certainly I would support efforts to gather that information, up to and including a lawsuit,” Assemblyman Bing said.

Calls to the D.D.C. were referred to the D.E.P. Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the D.E.P., said: “We’ve been very open to the with the community and Community Board 6. We’re not concealing any information from them …. We’ve done more outreach on this site than any other shaft site related to Water Tunnel No. 3.”

Downtown Barhoppers Beware

In its ongoing battle to curb bar noise and the proliferation of nightclubs within its district, Community Board 3, on Dec. 20, passed a resolution supporting Assemblywoman Deborah Glick’s Dec. 12 letter to Governor George Pataki requesting that the recently vacated commissioner’s position in the State Liquor Authority be filled by a New York City resident.

In November 2005, S.L.A. chairman Edward F. Kelly announced his retirement after a decade with the authority, shortly after State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into pricing practices in the state liquor industry. A week before, Mr. Pataki had announced the creation of a chief executive post with the S.L.A. to run its day-to-day operations.

A spokesperson for the Governor wouldn’t comment on the selection of the new commissioner, saying only that “the Governor always looks for the most qualified and capable individuals when making appointments.” Joshua Toas, a former Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Counsel to the Governor (and frequent contributor to Mr. Pataki’s campaign fund), was appointed to the chief executive position of the S.L.A. shortly after it was created.

Critics of the S.L.A. have long said that the authority ignores community input when granting new liquor licenses in New York City, especially in the bar-saturated neighborhoods of the East and West Village and Chelsea. The three neighborhoods have the greatest number of liquor licenses in the city (3,055, 1,866 and 944, respectively), according to a 2005 report prepared by the office of then–City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

Because the commissioners of the S.L.A. all live outside the city, critics contend that the S.L.A. is unaware of the acute noise problems and disruption to the community that this proliferation of bars causes. Lately, Board 3 conducted a public hearing to discuss the feasibility of converting Avenue B into a one-way street. Proponents contend that the change would ameliorate traffic noise on the busy weekend nights, but others are concerned that it would irrevocably alter the character of the neighborhood. Other groups have called for a complete moratorium on new liquor licenses for certain neighborhoods in the city.

“We are looking for greater sensitivity from the S.L.A. regarding the impact of granting the large number of licenses in a concentrated area,” Ms. Glick told The Observer. “I think that commissioners that infrequently visit the city—who may not come into some of the downtown areas—they may not have a full understanding of how many people live in the area, and in what proximity to these establishments they live.”

The Department of Environmental Protection, along with the Department of Design and Construction, is currently scoping out sites for the location of Shaft 33B, the latest infrastructure project for the long-awaited Water Tunnel No. 3, the 50-year, $6 billion project to update the city’s water system. But residents in the East 50’s are alarmed that the excavation, tentatively planned for the northwest corner of First Avenue and 59th Street, will disrupt their lives for the years it takes to complete the project.

Community Board 6, in response to these worries, passed a resolution last Wednesday that objected to the selection of any location for Shaft 33B by the D.E.P. “without a consolidated presentation of both the proposed location of 33B and the complete routing plans of the associated water mains … and full community participation in the decision of the routing of those mains.”

At a public hearing on Dec. 5 at the High School of Art and Design, nearly a thousand people packed the auditorium to oppose the D.E.P. plan, and the board’s resolution is another salvo in the ongoing contretemps that threatens to disrupt the project. At the heart of the matter isn’t so much the location of the shaft (although some people are opposed to that), but rather the location of the water mains that will connect the shaft to Water Tunnel No. 3 under Third Avenue.

The D.E.P. is responsible for the location, design and construction of both the water tunnel and Shaft 33B, but the D.D.C. is responsible for the water mains that will connect the two—and that’s where the problems begin. Once the D.E.P. makes a decision where the shaft will be excavated, then the D.D.C. will decide where the water mains should run. And in Manhattan, ripping up the streets to install those water mains will have an enormously detrimental impact on the neighborhood involved, project opponents say.

“We’re opposed to it because they will not tell us the water-main route,” said Linda Saputelli, the chair of the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition. According to Ms. Saputelli, the site for the water shaft shouldn’t be finalized until the D.D.C. makes public exactly where the water mains will run, how long the construction will last and how the neighborhood will be affected. Ms. Saputelli said that if work on Shaft 33B is approved, the water-mains component of the project will be a fait accompli, without any public oversight of a project that could adversely affect the neighborhood for years to come.

State Assemblyman Jonathan Bing has been working with the East 50’s Neighborhood Coalition to demand answers from the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. “Right now, the big issue is trying to make sure the entire project—both the water shaft and the water main—are viewed as one project,” Mr. Bing told The Observer.

According to the D.E.P., excavation of Shaft 33B could begin as early as the spring of next year and would continue until 2010. Construction of the water mains would begin concurrently and continue after the shaft is completed, finishing up sometime in 2011.

The D.E.P. has released a draft version of the environmental-impact statement for Shaft 33B, and comments were accepted until Dec. 22. The department will now finalize the environmental-impact statement, and responses to comments will be incorporated into the final document.

Ms. Saputelli told The Observer that she is currently contacting elected officials with her group’s concerns to force the D.E.P. and the D.D.C. to open up their selection process for water-main routes. A lawsuit to stop the project is possible, Ms. Saputelli said, if the city continues with the project without community input.

And she has support. “If the D.E.P. does not adequately provide information to the community about why this site has been chosen and why other sites weren’t chosen—and, more specifically, how the water shaft is going to be connected to the main water tunnel—certainly I would support efforts to gather that information, up to and including a lawsuit,” Assemblyman Bing said.

Calls to the D.D.C. were referred to the D.E.P. Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the D.E.P., said: “We’ve been very open to the with the community and Community Board 6. We’re not concealing any information from them …. We’ve done more outreach on this site than any other shaft site related to Water Tunnel No. 3.”

Downtown Barhoppers Beware

In its ongoing battle to curb bar noise and the proliferation of nightclubs within its district, Community Board 3, on Dec. 20, passed a resolution supporting Assemblywoman Deborah Glick’s Dec. 12 letter to Governor George Pataki requesting that the recently vacated commissioner’s position in the State Liquor Authority be filled by a New York City resident.

In November 2005, S.L.A. chairman Edward F. Kelly announced his retirement after a decade with the authority, shortly after State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into pricing practices in the state liquor industry. A week before, Mr. Pataki had announced the creation of a chief executive post with the S.L.A. to run its day-to-day operations.

A spokesperson for the Governor wouldn’t comment on the selection of the new commissioner, saying only that “the Governor always looks for the most qualified and capable individuals when making appointments.” Joshua Toas, a former Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Counsel to the Governor (and frequent contributor to Mr. Pataki’s campaign fund), was appointed to the chief executive position of the S.L.A. shortly after it was created.

Critics of the S.L.A. have long said that the authority ignores community input when granting new liquor licenses in New York City, especially in the bar-saturated neighborhoods of the East and West Village and Chelsea. The three neighborhoods have the greatest number of liquor licenses in the city (3,055, 1,866 and 944, respectively), according to a 2005 report prepared by the office of then–City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

Because the commissioners of the S.L.A. all live outside the city, critics contend that the S.L.A. is unaware of the acute noise problems and disruption to the community that this proliferation of bars causes. Lately, Board 3 conducted a public hearing to discuss the feasibility of converting Avenue B into a one-way street. Proponents contend that the change would ameliorate traffic noise on the busy weekend nights, but others are concerned that it would irrevocably alter the character of the neighborhood. Other groups have called for a complete moratorium on new liquor licenses for certain neighborhoods in the city.

“We are looking for greater sensitivity from the S.L.A. regarding the impact of granting the large number of licenses in a concentrated area,” Ms. Glick told The Observer. “I think that commissioners that infrequently visit the city—who may not come into some of the downtown areas—they may not have a full understanding of how many people live in the area, and in what proximity to these establishments they live.”

So it is disheartening to realize that the city's Department of Environmental Protection has not been on the job in its mission to protect the water supply. For the last six years, the D.E.P. has failed to report complete results from its testing of city water for lead, a dangerous contaminant. It turns out, now that the full results have been compiled, that lead in city drinking water was slightly above allowable levels from 2000 to 2001.

While officials are at pains to point out that there is no danger to the public, and even environmental advocates don't see any intentional or criminal misconduct, the revelation is disturbing. At a time when terrorists would be happy to poison our water supply, it is imperative that we have confidence in D.E.P.'s ability to spot potential contamination. When contamination is found, D.E.P. has to respond swiftly and be candid with the public.

State officials have stepped in, properly, and demanded that D.E.P. devise a plan to deal with lead leakage into the water supply. They also want D.E.P. to tell the public how much lead is in its drinking water.

These are important steps, but the larger issues remain. We live at a time when we can no longer take so many things for granted-including the safety of our water supply. The public must be reassured that D.E.P. is on a footing equal to that of the Fire Department, Police Department and other first responders.

D.E.P., like it or not, is on the front lines in the battle against terror at home. Its oversight of the city's watershed, aqueducts and water tunnels means that it is responsible for some of the city's most important infrastructure.

The public must be reassured that D.E.P. is doing its job, now more than ever.

Bernard Kerik: The Right Stuff For Homeland Security

"He's really an unknown factor in Washington." So said a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, speaking of the nervousness which spread through the department when the appointment of Bernard Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security was announced last week. When bureaucrats tremble, you know you're on the right track.

Mr. Kerik is hardly an unknown factor in New York, and his appointment immediately makes the city and its citizens much safer than we were under departing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Caving to pressure from Congress, Mr. Ridge was turning the department into another government entitlement program, with little acknowledgment that high-profile terrorist targets such as New York should receive a proportionate share of federal anti-terror funding. Mr. Ridge was in over his head, and his departure was overdue.

As a former police commissioner of New York, Mr. Kerik has firsthand experience of the threat that continues to shadow our nation. On Sept. 11, he was standing a block from the World Trade Center when the second jet hit. In the weeks and months that followed, he worked around the clock to return a sense of order and safety to the city. He retains a keen sense of the ongoing danger. "You can't put it behind us," he said recently, "and you can't forget about it. Because if and when you do, they're going to come back."

A high-school dropout and the son of a prostitute from the streets of Newark, Mr. Kerik rose to become a highly decorated undercover narcotics detective. Prior to Sept. 11, he had already established himself as a strong, tough-talking leader who didn't suffer fools and who had learned his trade as a street cop. Such in-the-trenches familiarity with the ways and means of criminals is essential in the war on terror. And unlike many of the hacks who warm chairs in Washington, he is results-oriented: When he served as commissioner of the city's Correction Department from 1998 to 2000, inmate slashings and stabbings declined by 90 percent. During the last year of his term as police commissioner, crime dropped by more than 12 percent while violent crime rates in other cities were rising. He also improved the department's ties with the city's minority communities by visiting church leaders.

After the Iraq invasion, President Bush sent Mr. Kerik to Iraq to establish a police force. During his four months there, he recruited thousands of police officers and formed teams to go after kidnappers, but has said that he wasn't given adequate funding to train a sufficient number of officers.

At the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Kerik will be overseeing a cumbersome bureaucracy that resulted from the combining of 22 separate agencies, with a budget nearly the size of that of the city of New York. To some, it seems like an impossible task. Then again, that's what they used to say about fighting crime in New York.

Divorce Made Simple

In some ways, New York City is a great place to get divorced: plenty of therapists to help pick up the pieces, and lots of other divorced, eligible singles to meet once the dust has settled. But when it comes to divorce law, New York is still in the Middle Ages. Unlike our neighboring states of New Jersey and Connecticut, or even heavily Catholic nations like Chile, New York State doesn't allow one spouse to unilaterally end a marriage-a so-called no-fault divorce. In fact, we make it almost impossible for people who want a divorce to get one; even if both partners agree that they have irreconcilable differences and that the marriage is over, one partner must take the blame. Which puts some couples in the absurd and humiliating position of agreeing to lie and say that one of them has suffered "cruel and inhuman treatment."

As a result of New York's obsolete divorce law, families suffer, children are permanently scarred, and abusive marriages are encouraged. Indeed, one study has shown that in states with no-fault divorce, suicide among women and domestic violence both decline, since the woman is empowered to end a marriage without her husband's consent.

Fortunately, the city and state bar associations are backing legislation in Albany to change to a no-fault model. While New York State legislators are mostly known for what they do not do-get a state budget passed, control Medicaid costs, work across party lines-now they have an opportunity to agree on helping couples disagree, and divorce, with dignity.

On Getting the Shaft

A wide cross-section of troops is mobilizing to prevent the residents of-and drivers on-East 54th Street from being shafted, quite literally.

The city has chosen the block between First and Second avenues as the favored site for an approximately 18-month construction project to build a shaft to the new water tunnel currently being built some 60 stories under Manhattan. Local residents, governmental representatives and Community Board 6 alike are outraged that the city has selected this site, which they claim would be especially susceptible to grave dangers during the construction process. The city's Department of Environmental Protection, though, has been thus far unmoved by the attempts to propose alternate sites, and hopes to begin construction in July 2006.

The project would take what is currently a designated through street (and therefore highly trafficked) and occupy it almost entirely with a 240-foot-long, 39-foot-wide construction area that is to be surrounded by 10-foot-high concrete walls. Consequently, there would only be room for a five-foot-wide sidewalk on either side and an 11-foot traffic lane to the south of the construction. Board 6 members learned at their Dec. 10 meeting that a fire truck needs 23 feet of clear horizontal space in which to place outriggers if it is to safely extend a ladder. Further, some have said that firefighters would have trouble entering the buildings to the north of the construction, and that such a narrow sidewalk bordered by a high wall will not only invite criminal activities, but will likely be inadequately lit and difficult to traverse for the area's many seniors. These and other safety concerns led the board's safety, environment and human-rights committee to vote in favor of a resolution demanding that the D.E.P. research a safer site for the shaft.

But such a request trembles meekly in the face of what is the largest non-defense capital project in the Western hemisphere, one which former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has referred to as an underground Great Wall of China. The city began constructing this third water tunnel in 1970 in order to protect the city's water supply in the event of failures in the two existing tunnels. By approximately 2005, the tunnel will link all five boroughs to the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers. In August 2002, construction began on the U-shaped Manhattan section of the tunnel, a nine-mile stretch that runs from West 60th Street and Amsterdam Avenue down to the Holland Tunnel, and up the East Side toward Central Park. Ten shafts at key points-such as the one under construction at Ninth Avenue and 13th Street that met such fierce Board 2 opposition-must be constructed in order to bring the water to consumers.

"I've never seen a city agency be as unresponsive to city concerns as D.E.P. has been so far," Sarra Hale-Stern, community liaison to New York State Senator Liz Krueger, told Board 6. Ms. Hale-Stern, along with Assemblyman Jonathan Bing and a representative from City Council Speaker Gifford Miller's office, were all in attendance to speak out against the shaft site. The three offices have been on the case for months now, exchanging letters and meeting with D.E.P. Commissioner Chris Ward-with little success. Ms. Hale-Stern later told The Observer that while her office first suspected the opposition to the 54th Street location was just another NIMBY issue, they have since learned that it is, in fact, grounded in very real safety concerns.

The residents of the Connaught Towers at 300 East 54th Street have employed an engineering consultant, Samuel Schwartz, who in the past has successfully argued the D.E.P. out of other proposed shaft sites. He researched and proposed 15 alternate locations to the city, among them East 59th Street, near the ramp to the 59th Street Bridge, primarily because it affects so few residents. But the D.E.P. has rejected all of his proposals-unfairly and without substantial rationale, the opposition claims. The department says it is sticking to the 54th Street site based on a variety of criteria, which include a required 8,000 square feet of open space; the need to be near Third Avenue; the preference for using city-owned property; the necessity to place the shaft within the water "pressure zone" that runs up the East Side between 33rd and 57th streets; and the need to finish all the shafts by 2008.

When contacted by The Observer , Senator Krueger said, "I'm not opposed to the water tunnel-obviously it's happening, we need it, it's a good thing. And apparently we need a shaft somewhere on the East Side. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is incumbent upon the D.E.P. to be able to 1) explain to the community why it's making the decisions that it's making, and 2) [demonstrate] that its decisions are not inconsistent with those of other equally important city agencies."

When The Observer asked D.E.P. spokesman Charles Sturcken for a reaction to the community members' opposition to the site and their claims that the D.E.P. is being inflexible, he retorted: "Do they like the water? Without water, there is no New York City." He also said that it was a mystery to him why this site has attracted the most opposition of any they've proposed.

-Benjamin Ryan

Stadium Seems Imminent,

But Board Adopts

Alternate Plan

Long before the New York Jets score their first touchdown in Manhattan, plans for an interception are already underway.

Last spring, the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association presented an alternate development plan to the Department of City Planning for the proposed 70,000-seat stadium that the Jets hope to build at Hudson Yards. Their alternative: don't build the stadium at all. On Dec. 3, Community Board 4-which until this point had not officially articulated an alternative to the rezoning and redevelopment of the neighborhood-unanimously adopted the HKNA proposal, formally staking claim on a different future for Hell's Kitchen, one they say will satisfy development needs while, at the same time, preserving the community.

"[The HKNA plan] allows us to go out and engage in dialogue [with city and state officials and community groups]," said Anna Levin, board member and co-chairwoman of the Clinton/Hell's Kitchen Land Use Committee, speaking to The Observer . "We weren't able to do this until we presented the Hell's Kitchen plan." Nonetheless, with reports that a tentative agreement between the city, the state and the football team may be released as soon as January, to some the board's adoption of a position has the appearance of being little more than a token gesture.

According to the city's plan, spearheaded by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Daniel Doctoroff, a total of $800 million from the Jets and $600 million from the city and state will fund the $1.4 billion stadium. Seated on the M.T.A.-owned Hudson railyards at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue, the stadium will be shadowed by a dense spine of commercial and residential towers stretching north to 38th Street and south to 35th Street between 10th and 11th avenues. Additionally, a commercial corridor of towers will stretch from Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue west to the Hudson River. The No. 7 subway line, which currently terminates at Times Square, will extend south to 34th Street, and the state-owned Jacob K. Javits center would enjoy a northward expansion. The project, whose total cost is estimated at $5 billion, may begin as soon as 2005.

"The alternative plan is a lot more neighborhood-friendly," said Vera Lightstone, a HKNA member, in introducing the scheme to the board on Dec. 3. "The city plan blocks a lot of community access to the waterfront."

The HKNA plan, which was submitted as part of the Environmental Impact Statement, places the bulk of the residential and commercial towers in the Hudson railyards, where the stadium is slated to go. The Javits Center would expand south rather than north, keeping 39th Street open to river access. A 10-acre park, directly linked to the Hudson River Park, would cover the roof of the expanded center. The plan doesn't include an expanded No. 7 line for the immediate future; instead, it would rely on a new bus line. According to Daniel Gutman, who led the presentation, the alternate plan would be less expensive than the current city plan.

But the city sees serious problems with the HKNA scheme. "The stadium is a fundamental part of the Hudson yards plan," said Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning. "The [HKNA] alternative doesn't meet the overall goals and objectives of the project. It doesn't give the Javits Center the expansion that it so desperately needs."

Mr. Chakrabarti is also concerned that the HKNA plan, contrary to its claim, actually provides less waterfront access than the city plan, which proposes two waterfront esplanades. "They have a park on top of the convention center, but that doesn't do you any good in getting to the water. It exacerbates the problem of waterfront access."

Members of the community have their own concerns about the proposal. "It's bogus," John Fisher of the Clinton Special District Coalition told The Observer . "It's basically the Doctoroff plan without the stadium." Furthermore, Mr. Fisher, a longtime resident, doesn't think the 40 million square feet of redevelopment is necessary for the community. "There's the assumption that the West Side is broken. [But] there doesn't need to be massive change. We'd like to be left alone."

Mr. Chakrabarti disagrees about the impact on the Hell's Kitchen "community." "There are less than 150 legal residences," he said of the Hudson yards vicinity. "Putting big buildings there will not alter the neighborhood, because on those blocks there is no neighborhood."

Despite community hesitation, Ms. Levin feels that the HKNA plan closely represents the board's position and will help in their fight against the stadium. And despite the fact that many say the arrival of the stadium is imminent, Ms. Levin remains optimistic. "The stadium is a misuse of a prime development site and will saddle us with other problems," she said. "If we can get a good public discussion going, we think that it won't happen."

-Ronda Kaysen

Jan. 6: Board 7, American Bible Society, 1865 Broadway, 7 p.m., 212-362-4008.

The Observer has learned that the Bloomberg administration has decided to build a new $2.5 billion, 16-mile-long underground aqueduct from the upstate reservoir system to the city. The Mayor made the decision, which has not been publicly announced, several weeks ago, and Christopher Ward, the commissioner of the city's Department of Environmental Protection, is expected to reveal key details at a City Council hearing on March 6. The new aqueduct is to be named the Kensico Aqueduct.

"We've committed the money for this project," Mr. Ward told The Observer . "It's going to happen."

As befits its name, the new aqueduct will originate in the upstate Kensico Reservoir, travel through Westchester County at a depth of around 700 feet, and finish at an underground valve chamber in the North Bronx that is the gateway to the entire city system. It will take 10 years to build, and design and engineering contracts are expected to be awarded within the next few months.

The Kensico Aqueduct is an entirely separate initiative from the Third Water Tunnel, a decades-old project that is being carved out of bedrock hundreds of feet beneath the city. The tunnel is confined to the five boroughs, whereas the aqueduct will transport water from upstate. There are signs, though, that the Third Water Tunnel has awakened in Mr. Bloomberg an interest in great public-works projects: Just before the end of the year, the Mayor made an unpublicized, impromptu visit to the tunnel, donning a hard hat and taking a construction elevator hundreds of feet into the bowels of Manhattan to drop in on the sandhogs, the tunnel workers who burrow through bedrock. Mr. Bloomberg came away awed by what he had seen.

The decision to build the new aqueduct comes as the city's water-supply system is nearing its 100th anniversary. At present, the 1.3 billion gallons of water that the city consumes each day are transported from upstate in three majestic but aging aqueducts–the New Croton, Catskill and Delaware aqueducts, all of which are between 60 and 100 years old and are plagued by leaks or valve failures. It's impossible to undertake extensive repairs to the aqueducts, however, because the city needs them to keep pumping at all times. Construction of the new aqueduct will make such repairs possible without major service interruptions.

"We're witnessing the snap, crackle and pop of an aging system," Mr. Ward said. "While there are no imminent calamities, it's critical that we launch the Kensico Aqueduct now, so we can care for the system's other aqueducts. It will take at least a decade to build the new one, and we can't defer those repairs forever."

The decision is a bold step for Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Ward. It will require a huge public expenditure amid the worst fiscal crisis in a generation. What's more, Mr. Bloomberg is committing the money to a project that has been regarded as something less than a priority by a string of previous Mayors. The proposal for a new aqueduct was first floated in the 1950's, and since then it has been all but forgotten, filed away by successive administrations in that most useful of bureaucratic categories, "needs further study."

But now Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Ward have taken the unexpected step of committing billions of dollars to a project that won't see its ribbon-cutting until well after the Mayor has left City Hall. And they're fully aware that they may pay a short-term political price for their efforts to secure the long-term health of the water system. Because funding for D.E.P. capital projects comes from water and sewer fees and not from general tax revenues, the new project is all but certain to cause a long-term rise in those fees. And that very likely will anger homeowners who are already furious about recent hikes in property taxes.

"While water and sewer rates will rise, we will do all that we can to keep them as low as possible," Mr. Ward said. "But if we don't build now, what will we have left New Yorkers with 50 years from now?"

A Huge Task

To grasp the magnitude of the task at hand, consider that the construction of the city's three current aqueducts were milestones in the hidden but spectacular history of New York's underground infrastructure. The birth of the modern water-supply system took place in 1905 with the completion of the New Croton Aqueduct, a turn-of-the-century engineering marvel of iron and brick that today continues to transport water from a patchwork of lakes and reservoirs in Westchester. A decade later, the city took a dramatic step forward when it opened the Catskill Aqueduct in 1915, which reached much farther north to tap the Catskills for the first time. The Delaware Aqueduct expanded the system's reach deep into the Western Catskills when it opened in 1944.

These aqueducts have been carrying torrents of water to the city continuously since their collective inception, so it's not surprising that they're showing scattered signs of wear and tear. The Delaware Aqueduct has a decades-old leak some 700 feet beneath Roseton, N.Y., a tiny rural town. Both the Catskills and New Croton aqueducts have been plagued by all manner of stresses and strains, such as minor leaks and oil intrusions-not harbingers of chaos, perhaps, but nonetheless in need of care.

The problem for Mr. Ward and the other men and women who maintain the city's water-supply system is that it's impossible to undertake extensive repairs to the existing aqueducts without shutting them down. And that's simply not an option, because closing even one aqueduct would leave millions of New Yorkers without water.

Then there's the remote possibility of terrorism. If somehow one of the aqueducts were to be ruptured-a scenario which city officials believe is virtually impossible-half the city could be left temporarily without water until the aqueduct was repaired. A new aqueduct would nullify that threat.

The new aqueduct is part of a 10-year, $16 billion capital plan designed to protect the city's water supply for decades to come. The plan, which was made available to The Observer , also includes funding for the extensive study of a new technique that may help the city in times of future drought.

The technique, which has never been tried in New York, is extraordinary: It entails injecting hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water into an underground aquifer on the Queens–Long Island border. If the water is injected by huge pumps, engineers believe, it will sit undisturbed inside an enormous underground bubble for an undetermined amount of time. In times of aquatic plenty, the city would thus be able to store fresh water in the aquifer, to be pumped out again during water shortages. City engineers are planning to begin testing the idea this summer, Mr. Ward said, and if it flies, it will be put to use in approximately a decade.

The engineering challenge of building the Kensico Aqueduct is no less daunting. On March 4, a crew of D.E.P. engineers met to map out what lies ahead. The first step is to work out an exact route. That entails doing an extensive study of the geology of the possible routes to search out-and avoid-faults, underground rivers and other geological flaws that could complicate the tunneling process.

The next step will be to fix on a designer who will work out logistics, such as hooking up the aqueduct to the Kensico Reservoir and finding points of entry for machinery. The actual tunneling will be done by a huge tunnel-boring machine known as "the Mole," a formidable, 70-foot-long contraption with spinning blades that chip away at the rock. The Mole is connected to a conveyor belt that carries the rubble back to the entry point, where it is raised to the surface and carried away. This technique is a significant advance on earlier techniques, such as the dynamite blasting that was used on the Delaware Aqueduct and the "cut-and-cover" method used to excavate the Catskill Aqueduct.

Once the aqueduct is complete, it is lined with thick walls of concrete. When finished, the aqueduct will be about 20 feet in diameter. At present, city engineers are grappling with a key issue: trying to determine just how much water the aqueduct should be designed to carry. It may be built on such a grand scale that it'll be able to carry the city's entire daily water supply.

To Hold Lottery for Admission

When, in January 2001, Columbia University announced its plans to construct a new K-8 private school for the children of its faculty and staff, a firestorm was set off between the university and Morningside Heights residents. Now, nearly a year after the groundbreaking for the building on 110th Street and Broadway, the storm has yet to subside.

In the latest chapter of the saga between the community and Columbia University, Community Board 7 heard testimony on Nov. 6 from a Columbia representative about the fall 2003 opening of the school. During her presentation, Marcia Sells, of the university's administrative planning department, outlined plans for a lottery system which the school will implement to select approximately 150 students (half of the projected initial student body of 300) from non-university-affiliated families living in School Districts 3 and 5.

The School at Columbia University, as it is called, was initially designed to attract new faculty who might otherwise be reluctant to relocate their children to Manhattan, by promising them both top-notch elementary schooling and homes in the building's new housing units. Among some of the more outspoken opponents of the school has been City Council member Phil Reed, who says it represents an elitist move to suck life out of the local public-school system. Already upset by the displacement of various retail outlets on the ground floor, residents have demanded that Board 7 negotiate a less exclusive use of the new building.

Community unrest gave birth to the Board 7–supervised lottery system, which Columbia says it will carry out in two phases: an initial drawing on Dec. 3, and-to ensure that the community has ample time to hear about the program-a later one at a date still to be determined. The university is currently launching a widespread advertising campaign to get the word out: placing newspaper ads, disseminating flyers, alerting superintendents and principals in School Districts 3 and 5, informing local elected officials and holding community forums.

The lucky winners will have an "informal interview" with the school that, according to Ms. Sells, will include no I.Q. or other intelligence test, and will only be used to determine that "this is the right school for them"-meaning to make sure there isn't any "really serious developmental concern." Upon admission, financial aid will be available for the $22,000-a-year school. Columbia children attend at a discounted rate.

But promises of community access are little reassurance for 110th Street Block Association member Carolyn Birden, who told The Observer that she believed, judging from past experience, that "private schools are very careful to select students who will be successful, and that means that a lot of students with disabilities or behavior problems will be shut out. That's how private schools maintain their great stats," continued Ms. Birden. "They just dump anybody with any problems at all into the public system."

"[Columbia's] initial approach was not consistent with our agreement," Board 7 chairman Larry Horowitz said of the lottery system, when contacted by The Observer . "The mechanics of [the lottery] were not accomplishing what we expected them to accomplish. We got into discussions with [Columbia], and they have reiterated their commitment to abide by the agreement, and they are working with our committee to get our input, primarily on outreach efforts and the mechanics of the lottery.

"It's a work in progress, and it's complex," Mr. Horowitz continued, pointing to the wrinkle of having a new president at Columbia (Lee Bollinger) step in this year. "We've been having ongoing discussions [with the new administration], and they are available and forthcoming with us. Personally, I think we're going to get there."

-Benjamin Ryan

City Plans to Wall In Segment of Ninth Avenue

When residents and business owners in the meat-packing district learned that the Third Water Tunnel-the largest capital project in the Western Hemisphere-was to set up a construction site for one of its water shafts off Ninth Avenue at 13th Street, they expected some hassles: 450-ton digging devices called "moles," noise, congestion, mountains of bedrock, dynamite. What they didn't expect was an announcement by the city's Department of Environmental Protection that it was planning to wall off half of Ninth Avenue for an entire block with 12 feet of concrete for four years.

"We don't understand how the D.E.P. would let that happen and disturb an entire neighborhood," Community Board 2 member Carol Yankay told The Observer .

A decade ago, the city's plan was to locate the construction area for the 600-foot-deep shaft to the Third Water Tunnel in a parking lot at what is now 18 Ninth Avenue. But Edison Parking Corporation, the lot's owner, fought off the city's attempts to acquire the property in the mid-90's, and as the price tag rose to $20 million, the city threw in the towel. Edison instead sold the lot to Richard Born, developer of the Mercer and Chambers hotels. Mr. Born entered into a 99-year lease on the property with Long Island City developer Michael Achenbaum, of WSA Management Ltd., who has recently begun construction on a 13-story hotel on the site.

In need of a construction area, the city's D.E.P., which is building the tunnel, is now eyeing the eastern half of Ninth Avenue and part of the eastern sidewalk between 13th and Gansevoort streets. The area has been approved by the city's Department of Transportation and will be cordoned off with the concrete wall starting some time in 2004, when the excavation is slated to commence (when the underground shaft is completed, the street above will be cleared).

A back-up for the First and Second underground tunnels that currently supply the city's water, the 60-mile long Third Water Tunnel-once compared in scope by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to an underground Great Wall of China-has been under construction since 1970 and will link all five boroughs to the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers upon its completion, approximately 18 years from now. This past August, ground was broken at 30th Street and 10th Avenue for the nine-mile Manhattan leg, a U-shape that starts at West 60th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, goes down the West Side to the Holland Tunnel, and heads north up the East Side.

The shaft at Ninth Avenue and 13th Street is one of nine planned for Manhattan that will bring water from the Third Water Tunnel, buried 60 stories deep in bedrock, up to consumers. But its location has become a point of contention, with neighbors balking at the proposed four-year blockade of Ninth Avenue. The concerns, as outlined in a letter to the D.E.P. from Community Board 4 (the site is located in Board 2's district, but the joint 14th Street Area Committee of Board 2 and neighboring Board 4 has been handling some of the related issues), include traffic obstruction-particularly of the M11 bus line-and cutting off a key loading zone for meat-packers and other area businesses.

"It would be horrifying!" said Carla Krasner, co-proprietor of Dufour Pastry Kitchens on Ninth Avenue at 13th Street, speaking to The Observer . Dufour supplies handmade hors d'oeuvres to hotels and gourmet shops like Zabar's and Balducci's and loads up its trucks along Ninth Avenue, where the proposed concrete wall will go up. "I don't know how we're going to schlep the goods down the cobblestones" to an alternate loading zone, said Ms. Kransner.

For now, Board 2 is continuing to lobby the Mayor's office to keep the dig off Ninth Avenue, potentially, they say, by acquiring the hotel site through eminent domain or by negotiating a deal with Mr. Achenbaum-whose construction permit has been granted and who broke ground in September-to delay his development until the completion of the excavation. But according to D.E.P. spokesman Charles Sturcken, the city is not considering a purchase. "If we don't have to, we don't want to acquire property," he told The Observer. "We'd rather use the public space for a temporary time … we definitely have a right to be on Ninth Avenue, and that's where we're going."

Failing city intervention, the community hopes that Mr. Achenbaum himself will have a change of heart and hold off on his project, given the logistical complications of a luxury hotel co-existing with a major excavation. The hotel, to be named the Gansevoort and completed by the end of 2003, was designed by architect Stephen Jacobs, whose previous projects include the boutique hotels Library and Giraffe. "If the city does not pull this permit, there will be a [13]-story hotel there with its front door facing a concrete wall," Board 4 member Tom Lunke told The Observer . "So I don't think that's going to be attractive to a high-end hotel." Mr. Achenbaum's spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

-Karina Lahni

Nov. 13: Board 6, New York University Medical Center, 550 First Avenue, Classroom A, 7 p.m., 319-3750.

Nov. 14: Board 5, Fashion Institute of Technology, 27th Street and Eighth Avenue, Building A, eighth floor, 6 p.m., 465-0907.

Nov. 19: Board 11, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Stern Auditorium, 1468 Madison Avenue, second floor, 6:30 p.m., 831-8929; Board 1, Seaman's Church Institute, 241 Water Street, 6 p.m., 442-5050; Board 3, P.S. 20, 166 Essex Street, 6:30 p.m., 533-5300.

And nearly eight tons of the lethal poison were missing from the truck.

Mr. Ward was frightened. Earlier this year, nine men with suspected ties to Al Qaeda were arrested in Italy bearing a cyanide-based substance and maps of Rome's water system. So Mr. Ward's first thought was that teams of terrorists were heading for New York, intent on dumping cyanide into the city's water supply.

"It felt like I was in a Tom Clancy novel," Mr. Ward told The Observer .

After placing the watershed police on orange alert-the second-highest state of warning-Mr. Ward asked his in-house scientists to assess the threat. Their conclusion: Even if all the cyanide were dumped into one reservoir, it would be rendered harmless by the billions of gallons of water that flow through the water system each day.

Now, a week after the incident, Mr. Ward remains on edge. He told The Observer that his watershed cops remain on orange alert.

The heightened security is one of many indications that Mr. Ward and his staff have been doing far more than has previously been disclosed to protect the city's drinking water from terrorists. Indeed, The Observer has learned that the city is quietly implementing a range of new initiatives to defend the water system from bioterrorist attacks. The new security measures-which were suggested in confidential briefings by federal security officials-were described by Mr. Ward in an interview with The Observer that constitutes the Bloomberg administration's first detailed explanation of the city's plan to keep its water safe.

Many of the new initiatives are based on recommendations contained in a top-secret assessment of the security of the city water supply conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers, Mr. Ward told The Observer . The measures include everything from infrared cameras guarding reservoirs to initiatives designed to fortify vulnerable "intake points" to a proposed fleet of floating three-armed machines-like robotic skeeter bugs-that would constantly sample reservoir water for pathogens.

Only 20 copies of the Army Corps assessment have been released to officials with direct influence over watershed security, and those officials have been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. The report was first undertaken in 1998 and quietly updated in the weeks after Sept. 11.

The Army Corps study is not to be confused with another assessment-released by a State Assembly committee to a flurry of headlines in mid-May-that blasted the city for not doing enough to protect its water supply from terrorists. Indeed, Mr. Ward's staff has dismissed that report, and Mr. Ward noted that the Army Corps study was a far more thorough security blueprint.

"This is a comprehensive plan put together by top federal security experts," he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers has reached a number of conclusions about the safety of the city's water supply-some reassuring, others less so. For instance, Mr. Ward noted, the study concluded that the watershed is so vast-1,900 square miles of reservoirs, aqueducts, rivers, streams and wetlands-that it would be very difficult to contaminate. That conclusion was behind the city's recent decision to allow fishing boats back on the reservoirs; they had been banned after Sept. 11.

"One of the greatest strengths of the watershed is simply its size," Mr. Ward said. "There are 850 billion gallons of water. There are 19 different reservoirs. And the watershed is 150 miles north of the city. It's almost impossible to use the New York City water system to really terrorize people."

Nonetheless, Mr. Ward said, the Army Corps believes that several new measures are necessary to "harden" the watershed's security. Many of the reservoirs are too large to be guarded by fencing; instead, Mr. Ward said, the D.E.P. will be doing aerial surveillance from a helicopter, and there will be constant boat patrols. Police patrolling the watershed in darkness will be outfitted with infrared night-vision goggles.

Mr. Ward added that he had asked the federal Office of Homeland Security for $14 million to launch a fleet of six security devices that would float on the reservoirs. The machines skim around the surface of the reservoir as they take constant samples to test the water for quality and pathogens.

"This will give us the capacity in the future to monitor for chemical agents," Mr. Ward said.

Not all the conclusions reached by these federal experts are reassuring. For instance, Mr. Ward candidly noted that Army Corps officials had concluded that the water system has a number of vulnerable points in or just outside city limits.

Bomb Scares

For instance, Mr. Ward said that in the days after Sept. 11, the Army Corps of Engineers and F.B.I. security experts examined two potentially vulnerable points: the huge intake valves at undisclosed locations in the North Bronx and North Brooklyn. These valves are engineering marvels: They are hundreds of feet underground, with all sorts of complicated machinery designed to ease the torrential flow of water from upstate into the city's water system. They are the main arteries of the system, the points where millions of gallons a day enter the city's vast network of water capillaries. As such, Mr. Ward said, they are more vulnerable to sabotage than the reservoirs themselves.

An explosive could be used to rupture an intake valve, a scenario which could cause enormous logistical problems by temporarily staunching the flow of water to hundreds of thousands of businesses and households.

"It would be a huge disruption, but it wouldn't be life-threatening or destabilizing," Mr. Ward said.

To guard against such a calamity, the F.B.I. and the Army Corps have recommended that the city fortify security at the entrances to these cavernous underground valve chambers. Mr. Ward said the city had added steel doors, installed security cameras and increased the number of security checks.

Two other potential weak points, Mr. Ward said, are the Jerome Park reservoir in the Bronx and the Hillview reservoir in Yonkers, both of which are in busy residential neighborhoods and thus more easily accessed. Although the bodies of water are far too large to be poisoned, city officials hope to prevent all forms of tampering by keeping people away entirely.

So those two bodies of water will be ringed with so-called tickler wire, which, when touched by either a fanatic bearing anthrax or a would-be skinny-dipper, will immediately relay an electronic signal to a nearby command center manned by D.E.P. watershed cops. The D.E.P. will also install a system of 33 infrared night cameras to monitor those two reservoirs.

Finally, the city is beefing up bioterrorism training for its watershed cops. The environmental police force, according to some environmentalists, is struggling with low morale and low pay and is unprepared for a high-stakes task such as guarding against bioterrorism.

"Suddenly, these underpaid watershed cops are faced with a real security challenge," said Democratic consultant Richard Schrader, who played a lead role in negotiating the 1996 watershed agreement that tightened pollution controls and enforcement in the reservoirs. "Historically, they have not been particularly well trained-and worse, they have operated without a stable chain of command."

In the end, the toughest task for Mr. Ward may be battling the perception that the water system is an easy target for terrorists. The image of huge drums of poison being dumped into the reservoirs could distract from the real threats: a lack of training for watershed cops, and the possibility that a bomb could devastate the system's intake points.

"Given the system's breadth and complexity, poison is not a real threat to the city," Mr. Ward said. "We are taking precautionary measures at the points of structural vulnerability, so people should be doubly reassured.