The Delaware River is the largest free-flowing river east of the Mississippi.

Some 15 million people rely on the Delaware, and most of New York City and all of Philadelphia use it for drinking water. Additionally, millions use it for recreation; 5 million people alone visit the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area each year. Then there are the fish, birds and other wildlife who live in the river and along it.

But very fact that the river is free-flowing — which is to say that it is not dammed at any point from its upstate New York headwaters until it empties into Delaware Bay — has caused substantial destruction in the residential communities along the river in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania after each of the three major floods since 2004.

Those floods took lives, displaced several thousand people and cost millions of dollars in damage, primarily along the stretch of river in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania.

Enough is enough, say these residents, who are begging the Delaware River Basin Commission for relief. That would be in the form of a plan to manage discharges from three reservoirs upriver from flood-prone areas.

Trouble is, these long-suffering residents have some pretty formidable competition: All of those people who drink the river’s water, boat and fish on it and use its wildlife habitats, not to mention the wildlife itself.

The history of the Delaware River since Colonial times looms large in whether the contradictory interests of the residents and everyone and everything else can be balanced. That history – notably a decade-long war over an immense dam project that attained international notoriety — is a cautionary tale.

There has been no greater disaster in the modern history of the Poconos than the battle over that project – the Army Corps of Engineers plan to dam the Delaware River at Tocks Island. Not even the deadly twin hurricanes of 1955 can compare.

Tocks Island would be a lightning rod for the nascent American environmental movement. It would destroy the careers of some politicians and bring success to others. It would be the cause of suicides, arsons and violence. It would expose deep tears in the social fabric of the Poconos, unleashing a deep bitterness against the Corps and the dam’s powerful, politically connected backers that seems just as intense today as it was three decades ago.

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