UPDATE:

Michael Deloach, the DEP Deputy Commissioner for Public Affairs & Communications, spoke at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee on Tuesday night and addressed resident complaints of water taste and smell. Deloach conceded that the DEP could have done more in communicating with the public but insisted that there were no health risks in consuming city tap water.

“No question it wasn’t quality and up-to-snuff as what we usually deliver,” Deloach said of the “metallic”-tasting water Bronx residents reported drinking over the last few weeks. “Moving forward when we do have a big shift from one reservoir to another, we’ll do a better job of alerting the public and elected officials.

Deloach said the shifts happen all the time and residents rarely register the change. DEP believes the noticeable smell and taste of the water this month was thanks to an increase mineral deposits in the Croton reservoir system, something they will work to control in the future.

“I don’t think we thought it would be as extreme as it ended up being or in people’s minds considered it being,” person said. “Our water supply folks are making sure they do everything in their power to deliver the quality, good water we’re so used to having and that we don’t have an incident like this again.”

The city Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) temporarily shut down the water flow from the Croton watershed reservoirs on Monday after increasing it from normal levels earlier this month after. renovations on another water source.

“We New Yorkers have always been spoiled with our water,” Fordham Hill Owners Co-op president Myrna Calderon told the Norwood News. Calderon and other residents in the complex experienced the “moldy” water. “And now we have to be concerned about the water and that’s unacceptable.”

Hundreds of New Yorkers called 311 this month to complain of a “bitter” or “metallic” taste in the tap water. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13, 107 water quality complaints originated from the Bronx, compared to 20 the entirety of September and 19 in August. Over the weekend, calls from the Bronx about water quality dropped into the single digits.

“Although the water remains safe, over the weekend we decreased the percentage of Croton water going into the distribution system as we refine the mix of water from east and west of the Hudson River,” DEP spokesperson Ted Timbers told the Norwood News.

Renovations of the 113-year-old Catskill Aqueduct began this month, forcing the DEP to rely more on the Croton watershed in Westchester County. New Yorkers have been drinking Croton water for 150 years, according to the DEP. The renovation on the Catskill Aqueduct will take ten weeks and cost $156 million.

“The reason for increasing the percentage of Croton water is that we will be shutting down one of the two large Aqueducts that bring water from our west of Hudson Catskill reservoirs down to the City,” Timbers said. “The geology of those two areas are different, which means the water from different reservoirs can have different tastes.”

New York City gets its water from upstate reservoirs that flow through treatment facilities like the one in Van Cortlandt Park, before reaching residential and commercial faucets.

Both Assemblyman Jose Rivera and Councilman Fernando Cabrera, who represent parts of Bedford Park and live in the Fordham Hill Oval Co-Op, called for intervention and improved transparency.

“They should’ve communicated,” Cabrera told the Norwood News.  “You shouldn’t have hundreds of people calling in frantic about it and concerned about the water they drink.”

Cabrera said that Westchester County government has a policy of giving notice when the water makeup would be changed and said that there should be a similar policy adopted by the DEP. But it is unclear if such a policy exists in Westchester County and officials there did not respond to inquiries by the Norwood News. City DEP officials indicated that advanced notice of changes to the city’s water supply would be difficult due to the frequency of adjustments.

“Operational decisions about the City’s water supply, including the percentage of Catskill/Delaware/Croton water, are made on an hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis,” Timbers said. “Factors include (but are not limited to) available storage in the reservoirs, weather predictions, time of year, interstate agreements with Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, quality of water in the reservoirs, demand from the five boroughs and the 1 million upstate customers who use NYC water, infrastructure repairs, etc.”

Cabrera spoke with DEP officials on Tuesday morning, but was still frustrated with an unclear plan going forward and the overall lack of communication, according to his office. Even if decisions regarding the city’s water supply are made daily, a disruption as significant as this one should include some kind of heads up to the neighborhoods effected, Cabrera’s chief of staff, Greg Faulkner, argued.

“It was a real disrespect to the community,” Faulkner said. “They should get on the phone and talk with elected officials in the community and tell us the plan.”

Rivera called on the state government to get involved because he says he does not trust Mayor Bill de Blasio to properly handle the situation.

“As the current NYCHA lead poisoning crisis attests to, we cannot rely on the current mayoral administration to provide us with factual information, nor the proper oversight needed to remedy this crisis,” Rivera said in a statement on Monday. “I am calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo to intervene in this matter and… ensure that New York City’s water supply system is healthy and unhazardous.”

The DEP said they completely halted Croton water from entering the city’s system on Monday, but plan on adding it back to the mix at some level.

“We anticipate adding it back in soon as we continue to refine the mix of water from east and west of the Hudson River,” Timbers wrote. “The Croton system will play an important role in meeting demand during the shutdown of the Catskill Aqueduct.”

Up-to-date information on water distribution and point of origin in New York City can be found on the DEP website.