Publications

Inspection of the Goose Creek Bridge in southeastern Nassau County in April 1998 by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) indicated a separation of bridge piers from the road bed as a result of pier instability due to apparent seabed scouring by tidal currents. This prompted a cooperative study by the U.S. Geological Survey with the NYSDOT to delineate the extent of...

A valley-fill aquifer system that extends along a 14-mile reach of the Susquehanna River valley in southwestern Broome County, N.Y., is a major source of water supply to local municipalities and industries, but is highly susceptible to contamination from human activities. Protection of ground-water supplies requires accurate delineation of the areas that are the sources of water pumped...

The Village of Marathon, in Cortland County, N.Y., has three municipal wells that tap a relatively thin (25 to 40 feet thick) and narrow (less than 0.25 mile wide) unconfined sand and gravel aquifer in the Tioughnioga River valley. Only one of the wells is in use because water from one well has been contaminated by petroleum chemicals from a leaking storage tank, and water from the other...

No abstract available.

A 6-year (1990-96) study of the Ellison Park wetland, a 423-acre, predominantly cattail (Typha glauca) marsh in Monroe County, N.Y., was conducted to document the effect that this wetland has on the water quality of Irondequoit Creek, which flows through it. Irondequoit Creek drains 151 square miles of mostly urban and suburban land and is the main tributary to Irondequoit Bay on Lake...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Sixteen different pesticides or their metabolites (degradations products) where detected in water samples collected in 1999 from three networks of lakes and reservoirs in upstate New York that are sources of public water supply. The networks sampled included the New York City network (10 reservoirs); the Finger Lakes-Great Lakes network (three Finger Lakes and two Great Lakes that supply...

Flood-frequency relations that are developed by fitting the logarithms of annual peak discharges to a Pearson Type-III distribution are sensitive to skew coefficients. Estimates of population skew for a site are improved when computed from the weighted average of (1) the sample (station) skew, and (2) an unbiased, generalized skew estimate. A weighting technique based on the number of...

In 1997, the U.S.Geological Survey (USGS) and the City of Rochester began a cooperative program to study the presence of pesticides (herbicides and insecticides) that occur at trace levels in Hemlock and Canadice Lakes and their tributaries. The most frequently detected pesticides in streamflow and lake-water samples were herbicides commonly used in agriculture — atrazine, metolachlor...

The hydrogeology of the 299-square-mile Beaver Kill basin in the southwestern Catskill Mountains of southeastern New York is depicted in a surficial geologic map and five geologic sections, and is summarized through an analysis of low-flow statistics for the Beaver Kill and its major tributary, Willowemoc Creek. Surficial geologic data indicate that the most widespread geologic units...

Twenty five pesticides or pesticide metabolites were detected in samples collected from May, 1998 through January, 1999 in three small public-supply reservoirs in western New York. Samples were collected at tributaries and reservoir outlets for comparison with samples from the water-supply intakes. No samples from public-water-supply intakes exceeded any Federal or State water-quality...