The Closing of the Aqueous Free Range

Some of Long Island's post-WWII contentions with groundwater contamination are well-known.  As historians William McGucken and Adam Rome have shown, it became the earliest site of the discovery that the new phosphate detergents were seeping into drinking water.  But that discovery, picked up by journalists as signaling an ominous national trend, was only part of a larger story. 

As it suburbanized from the 1940's through the 60's, this corner of greater New York led a trend among American cities toward growing dependence on aquifers for water.  Long Island’s aquifers were studied and tapped sooner and more extensively than most, at first because the nation’s largest city lay on its western tip, but after the war, because that city itself sprawled rapidly outward, onto an island surrounded by salt water.  Even before detergent contamination turned up, the island’s aquifers were troubled by other problems: salt water contamination, seepage of industrial wastes, and the prospect, given spiking demand, that they might run out of water. 

Summarizing these controversies, my paper will attend in particular to what newspaper coverage often obscured: that the direst of these effects struck the least well-off of suburbanites.  Threading through my discussion will be a larger thesis about resultant changes in the legal status of Long Island’s aquifer.  Into the early twentieth century, what Don Worster has described as a frontier “takings” doctrine applied to the wells Long Islanders dug.  But especially after WWII, as this underground commons was found to be so vulnerable, and parts of it were contaminated beyond repair, access to it was restricted or shut down.  Like lands of the rural West over the nineteenth century, Long Island’s aqueous “free range” was closed.